


icarus is flying towards an early grave

by jonphaedrus, soulofthamasa (magicgenetek)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Chronic Illness, Dissociation, Gaslighting, Healer Ardyn, Implied/Referenced Incest, Improper Use Of My BA, M/M, Murder, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Physical Abuse, Riots, Sexual Abuse, Sibling Incest, Unhealthy Relationships, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-23 17:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9669188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus, https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicgenetek/pseuds/soulofthamasa
Summary: Classically, when an Icarus falls in love with the sun, it is the human who falls and burns up in his foolish attempt to touch divinity. Cor knows better than to act on his feelings for King Ardyn Lucis Caelum, the star whom all of Lucis revolves around, because when mortals love kings, it rarely end well for the mortal.But it is Ardyn who falls when the secret of his healing powers is revealed to the kingdom, and Cor is the only Icarus fool enough to try and catch a star before the sea swallows him whole.





	1. dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cor fell in love with the sun when he was nineteen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in the newest rendition of "this is not what your ba is for" here's me using my ba for definitely not what it's for.
> 
> old lucis in this fic is basically just late republican/early imperial rome, and the most important thing to know abut rome before going into this fic is roman naming conventions. for a more comprehensive rundown check out [the wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_naming_conventions#The_tria_nomina) but a simple rundown is this: lucis uses the traditional roman naming convention of three names—the praenomen, nomen, and cognomen. by the time of xv proper, this has been lost by all but the most patrician families (noct and ignis both have three names) but old lucis would no doubt have this system set up.
> 
> using ardyn as an example:
> 
> ardyn | lucis | caelum  
> praenomen | nomen | cognomen
> 
> the praenomen was the personal name. this would only be used by close friends, lovers, and family. to call a man, especially one of a higher rank, by their praenomen was _extremely_ inappropriate, and wouldn't be done. that was reserved for formal use in the full name or private. even using it in public as a relative was a lil weird. 
> 
> the nomen was the family name (basically, our surname) and the cognomen was a nickname. most men in the roman empire were called by their cognomen. for an example, look at the emperor vespasian. titus flavius vespasianus was his full name, but he was called vespasian by pretty much everyone (including his family, as he shared his praenomen with his brother, titus flavius fabinus, because rome didn't have many usable first names). gaius julius caesar is another good example.
> 
> following this system, people in this fic are gonna be called by their cognomen over anything else except w their families.

Cor fell in love with the sun when he was nineteen.

 

 

Titus had wanted to join the Royal Legion since they’d been children. When Cor had been seven, ten years prior, there had been an outbreak of the Scourge in their tiny village that had decimated Caem. It had taken their father and younger sister before the King had arrived, and Cor still remembered seeing him ride into town. He had no escort or guard, unneeded in the peace his father’s reign had brought. It was just the King atop his chocobo, and he’d dismounted in the empty street as if it was just another day for him. Cor still remembered: the dust on his travel tunic turning tan cloth dark brown; the way his hair had been stuck to his face with sweat; how he hadn’t even paused for water before he’d begun to move through the citizens with a smile, wiping the Scourge from them with nothing but his hands.

Cor had never forgotten the way the man had looked, when Ardyn Lucis Caelum had knelt before him, brushed a palm over his forehead, and the taint in his blood had vanished following his fingers. He’d had to have been all of seventeen then, newly crowned, and he’d still ridden the better part of two weeks all the way out to Caem just to heal everyone he could and dispatch those he could not.

Titus had come out the other side of that wanting to protect people, to serve in the Legions, or—ideally—to serve in the Coronae, the elite group of soldiers who attended to the royal family. Cor just wanted to serve the King in any way he could. He’d had no complaints when Titus had decided they’d go to Insomnia when they were grown, to fight in the name of King and Crown.

He harboured no maundering delusions of grandeur like his brother did; being a legionnaire would be good enough for him.

 

 

When Cor was seventeen and Titus nineteen, their mother died of a summer cold in peaceful sleep. They buried her out behind their little thatch-roofed house, packed up their few meagre belongings, sold the farm, took the money, and walked toward Insomnia. High summer meant locusts buzzing around their feet on the hard packed roads, and they traded gil for cart rides through Cleigne, Duscae, and Leide before they finally arrived on the outskirts of the Royal City.

Titus hefted his pack up on his shoulder, and nodded. “Well,” he said, “I guess let’s do this.”

Insomnia was huge, sprawling, every street jam-packed with tabernas, carts, chocobos shrieking at the top of their lungs, dirt and dust and _people_. They stuck to one another like burrs to not be separated in the crush of people. Cor followed his brother, head and shoulders over the rest of the crowd, as they eventually found their way to a barracks and joined up. It wasn’t hard; Izunia Lucis Salum was all of twenty-three and already a military commander worthy of remembrance, the strong arm to his brother’s gentle breast, the dark to Ardyn Lucis Caelum’s light.

Tenebrae and Niflheim were always on their doorstep, tensions always high. Lucian sons and daughters were always needed to fight, and the most elite would be gifted with Warp from the crystal by their King.

His first night in the barracks bunks was strange, but it felt _right_ : his brother above him, laughing with some of the older men. Cor was the youngest there but he didn’t mind. The other men treated him like a mascot, and he had always picked things up fast. He _wanted_ to do well. He _wanted_ to earn respect, to find a place like the one he’d never had on their little farm in Caem.

He wanted to see the King smile at him, as he had, that one single time before, the first time he’d saved Cor’s life.

 

 

It was a warm, late-spring day in the year Cor turned nineteen. He was off duty, and he’d been to a taberna with his brother. He hadn’t drunk to excess, and had been on his way to pick up some much-needed supplies after his meal—replacement hobnails for his boots, a whetstone for his sword. Dusk threw its purple and blue tendrils across the expanse of the sky to set the mood; as he crossed a bridge over one of Insomnia’s wandering rivers, he heard the shouting.

“No!” It was a woman screaming, and Cor froze, turned. She was ragged, in a dirt-stained smock—desperately poor, by the looks of it—and crouched at the banks. It had been a spring of heavy rains, and the rivers of Insomnia were riding high and fast. “Ptongus!”

Cor searched, his eyes glancing off of the water, before he spied what was going on.

Her son, no older than five, had fallen into the river. He was desperately clinging to a dipped-in line of laundry and was shrieking at the top of his lungs, but the moment his little grip failed he would be swept away. The mother was shouting, and a crowd was gathering, and Cor was turning, trying to shuck off his armour, when he felt more than heard shoving from one end of the bridge.

“Hold this,” someone said, and Cor managed to glance out of the corner of his eye to see a man cramming a heavy black and purple toga into his companion’s arms, and then shouted in surprise as _Ardyn Lucis Caelum_ ran past him and dove seamlessly into the water in only a tunic and sandals. The current was powerful, but here the river was no deeper than his chest, and the King managed to get his feet onto the bottom and started to walk upstream.

“Your Majesty!” Cor shouted without thinking. He dropped the toga and leapt in after him, ignoring the weight of his heavy leather armour as he caught the King before he was swept away in the current. His hand burned if scalded where he touched the man, hot flesh in icemelt water, which indelibly imprinted of one of the King’s sharp shoulder blades into Cor’s palm like a brand. The dye for his tunic, rich black and purple, ran freely in the water, leaving them in the centre of an inkstain puddle that whipped downstream with every thunder of the current.

There were water droplets in his eyelashes, and brushing over the arcs at the curve of his cheekbones. Cor could not look too long; he had to _make_ himself not look for too long.

“My goodness!” the King replied, one hand clapped to the top of his head to straighten his golden laurel wreath stuck to his sopping curls; it had been knocked askew by his fluid dive. “This is turning into several layers of a rescue _far_ too fast for my tastes!” Still, with Cor at his back, Ardyn—no, _Caelum_ , Cor had to think, had to not give in to familiarity even in his thoughts—swam upstream just far enough that when the boy’s grip failed he went no more than fifteen feet into the King’s waiting arms. Cor half-dragged the monarch to the banks, where he passed on the wet, crying child to his mother, still kept upright by Cor’s weight at his side. “Be more careful,” Caelum said, breathless, holding onto Cor’s shoulder as he dragged himself up the banks of the river. “Especially with the current so high.”

The mother was crying, sobbing into her little boy’s hair, practically prostrate at the King’s feet, and he left Cor’s arms to press a gentle touch to the top of her head. Cor, still ankle-deep in water, found his mouth dry. Here was his monarch wearing some of the richest fabrics that could be made - now an awkward mauve-tinged grey with all the dye that had been lost in the current - water squelching out of his fine sandals, gold bangles at his wrists clicking and dripping water, his ceremonial laurel wreath only staying on his head because he’d put his hand on it to keep it there, standing in the Insomnian dirt like an Astral come to life; sunlight was barely contained in his skin. Soaking wet, his tunic clung to his soft thighs and the sloping, gentle width of his well-fed waist and hips, to the underside of his doughy arms. His hair was longer than Cor’s childhood memories placed it, curls straightened by the water that logged them, plastered to his neck and his collarbones and down just to the dip of his pectorals revealed by the way his tunic awkwardly clung to the skin of his chest. His lips were almost as red as his hair against his pale, chilled skin; there was still water in his eyelashes, his amber eyes brighter than the half-set sun.

“Your Majesty,” the woman cried. “I can’t—I don’t—“ the King knelt beside her and cupped her head in his hands. His wreath almost toppled off of his head without his hand keeping it there, but he ignored it to pull her face to his shoulder so she could muffle her tears in the rich fabric of his tunic. A little saltwater could not make it any worse. “You could have—“

“I would be no King at all, if I could not do so simple a thing,” Caelum murmured. “Please, dear lady, if it’s not too much, you and Ptongus can accompany my brother and I back to the Citadel; the Astrals know you both look as if you need some meat on your bones.”

Almost awakened by the King’s words, realising the tableaux he was now indelibly part of, Cor looked up the banks of the river to the bridge. There were people all clustered around the edge of the bridge, looking down, and a contingent of Coronae guards accompanied the King’s brother where he stood just off the edge of the road, Caelum’s toga a bundle of wool in his arms. Cor had never seen the Consul before that day: he was the moon to his brother’s sun, with thick, curly dark hair cut soldier-short; a proper military tunic, practical leather armour and sandals and vambraces; and his skin sun- and smoke-tanned, crossed with thin sword scars from heated battles.

Izunia Lucis Salum was not staring at Ardyn, crouched with dirt all over his milky calves, touching a woman who had lived in squalor all her life as he promised her something _better_. Salum, Cor realised with a shudder, was staring _at Cor_ with a look of ill-concealed fury on his handsome face, thin lips curling under his trimmed beard. Salum’s eyes, Cor noticed, were the same colour he saw reflected in the mirror: a strange pale blue, near-luminous, brighter than the sky. To have his own eyes glaring back at him in fury was strange against his skin and Cor quailed, shrank, unsure, as the King stood and turned toward his brother.

“You could have gotten yourself killed,” Salum snapped, coming over and righting the King’s crown with gentleness that the tight fury coiled in his voice and his words belied. Caelum shivered, soaking and chilled by the oncoming dusk, as Cor finally forced himself into movement and crawled up the embankment himself. He would have no royal brother waiting for him with a warm toga; if he didn’t get out of the water soon, he’d freeze. “When,” Salum continued, wrapping his brother back in his toga again, tucking him back into decency, “Will you learn to think for even a _moment_ before you do foolish things?”

“When you learn to smile, my dear brother.” There was laughter cloaked in those admonishing words, and the King turned back to their guards. He sent a man to help the woman up and bring her and her son with the royal cortege. Cor just sat dumbfounded on the edge of the embankment, his tunic and leathers dripping, his hair plastered just above his eyes, watching the King, drawn to him like a flower to the sun.

Ardyn’s freckles stood out on his skin more when he was cold, but they were soon hidden by Salum’s enveloping touch. Now that he had his brother safely back, the Consul had ceased to pay any attention to Cor. But—

So had the King.

Caelum, an arm around his younger brother’s shoulders, wringing his soaking hair out with his free hand, the dye from his toga running black down his calves, dark against his red hair, his freckles bright against his pale skin in the orange light of the setting sun. It set his hair alight, fire and dust haloing his head so he was wreathed in flame, the rays of the sun turning him into an imitation not the slightest bit pale. He was the sun in human form, so bright that he could blind if Cor had looked too close; could burn the skin and muscles and flay them from his bones.

Cor stared at him and felt raw inside, utterly wordless for the knowledge that he _loved_ Ardyn Lucis Caelum, as deep the sea and as fast as the current that had would have swept both king and child away had he not been there to save them.

And the King, of course, had eyes only for his brother, eyes only for the Consul, who did not bother to even spare a glance back at the soldier. Neither of them did. Neither of them would, for he was nothing and no-one. If Ardyn was the sun, as stunning and brilliant as the noon, and Izunia was the life-giving tides from the waxing and waning full moon, then Cor Leonis was nothing but a shadow who longed for the touch of light.

Cor was nineteen, and the fool in love with the star Lucis herself circled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "salum" in izunia's name means "the open sea" or "the deep ocean"


	2. midnight sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was like the dawn, when the sun was not yet at its precarious zenith, nascent and unformed.

It was three months later that Cor returned from his rota to find his brother packing his things up in their bunk. “Titus?” He asked, surprised, and his brother looked up at him. Titus Drautos rarely looked pleased, but he did today, his broad face flushed with pleasure. “Did something happen?”

“Take a look at this,” Titus replied, and swung his hand through the air. As he did it, his sword appeared in his outstretched grip in a cloud of glass shards and red light. Cor stared. “I’ve been promoted.” Cor just kept staring. “To the Consul’s personal guard within the Coronae.”

Titus looked so pleased; Cor laughed and came over to clap his brother on the shoulders. “I didn’t think it would be so fast! You must have been doing something right!” Titus dragged Cor into a headlock and the two of them tussled; Titus headlocked him. “Now I have to work harder to keep up!” Titus let him go after a moment, and Cor’s breath escaped him in a single rushed gasp as his brother hugged him tight.

“I’ll miss you,” Titus said, tight, into his hair. “I’ll put in a good word for you, whenever I can. You’ll be made a part of the guard as well, I know it.” Cor did not say it, but he thought to himself that he would be honoured by such a position—but not for the Consul. He would not go to war with the brother, when he could stand at peace with the King.

“Soon,” Cor had instead replied, holding tight to his brother’s shoulders. “I promise, as soon as I can.”

 

 

The years passed quickly in the legions. Cor was promoted to Optio when he was twenty-two, a little young for the role, but took to it with aplomb. He saw his brother less as Drautos had become a favourite of the Consul. Titus was more often at Salum’s side than he was at anyone else’s, and their meetings became postponed dinner plans and chance encounters on duty.

It was at one of those rare dinners, at a better taberna than they had frequented early on to their service, that Titus stuck the tip of his paring knife into the wood of the table and spread his palms. “The King is going on a pilgrimage,” he said, and Cor looked up, picking an olive pit out of his teeth, hesitating as he waited for his brother to continue the explanation. “To Tenebrae, to visit the Oracle.”

“Right now?” Cor was surprised—another border skirmish had broken out with Niflheim, and the army had been mobilised. Titus was leaving the following morning to accompany the Consul to the border, to oversee the war effort. “It doesn’t seem like the time for it. Shouldn’t he stay here?”

“That’s what the Consul said,” Titus replied, sighing. “But the King doesn’t listen to much of anyone once he’s decided on something, and he said he needs to speak to the Oracle and her Messenger.”

“So, Insomnia won’t have either one of them. Great.” Cor didn’t fear a coup of any sort; the only person that loved the King more than the people was his brother. Izunia and Ardyn rarely parted except when the Consul had to oversee war efforts. Salum’s legion had remained on the home front fight off the daemons that managed to get close enough to populated areas to need to be dealt with, but that wouldn’t stay true for long.

“I’ve recommended Salum that your Century be sent with him.” Cor blinked, glanced up at the other man, stared. “It’s too dangerous to send him just with the Coronae,” Titus added as Cor’s consternation grew. “He needs a bigger escort than if it was just daemons to deal with. If he were ambushed...”

“I get it,” Cor interrupted. “Why _me_ , Titus? We’ve not seen any combat but with daemons, surely—there’s another century that would be better suited for this kind of a detail.” He was still honoured by his brother’s trust and the warm look that stole over Titus’ face. Titus reached out and set a hand on Cor’s shoulders.

“Because I know you,” Titus replied, “and I trust you. And the Consul trusts me to pick someone who I trust, someone who I know would die rather than see the King hurt. You can’t even begin to imagine how much Salum cares for his brother, Cor. He’s terrified of this trip.” Cor couldn’t deny Drautos’ words being true; he would have done anything for His Majesty. Anything at all.

(He still remembered the downy red hair of Ardyn’s thighs, stained black from the dye leaking out of the wool of his tunic, glistening with water, and how soft his body was, warm and plush.)

“I can’t be sure that he’ll take my recommendation, of course.” Drautos tapped his fingertips on the taberna table. “But, if he does select you...”

“I would be honoured,” Cor said simply, smiled. “And I’ll live up to the family reputation.”

Drautos left the following morning with the Consul, the procession stretching far out of the Insomnian gates. Cor had been on duty down by the slums, and had not seen the scene at the farewell between the brothers, but he heard of it that evening back at the barracks. The King, they said, had cried when his brother had left, been loathe to let him go, his handsome face creased and soft with emotion. “He’s too gentle,” their Centurion said as Cor unlaced his boots to prepare to sleep. “The man will get himself killed.”

They were given the assignment to Tenebrae when they awoke.

 

 

The King’s escort for this pilgrimage was made up of Cor’s full Century and his own cohort of the Coronae, and it was clearly more than he wanted. From the moment that they were all assembled, the man looked displeased, and Cor, marching just behind where Caelum was on chocoback, could hear the sound of his voice raised in deep displeasure as he complained bitterly about the present situation.

But he persevered, even if he did insist on shedding all but his personal guards when they came to each town and village, then making the Coronae stand back so that the citizens would come to him without fear, children flocking with shrieks of delight to his arms. Each village would have a handful of injuries and ills and he would heal them, cast out the Scourge, and then ride subdued and tired until they camped.

It was at the end of their second week on the road that Cor was on guard duty, taking a turn around the edges of the camp, when someone stumbled directly into his line of sight. Whoever it was, they had the king’s black chocobo on a lead behind them, and the bird looked vaguely perturbed. “Hey,” Cor said, coming up close, as the person looked at him. “What are you doing with her—“

The stranger paused, and then grabbed their cloak and took off at a sprint into the darkness, the chocobo jerking along silently behind them. Cor grunted and started running after them, taking his hand off of his sword. The figure didn’t get more than fifty paces before Cor tackled them, his longer legs and better physical shape giving him an edge, the chocobo warking quietly in surprise and dancing as it’s leader lost its reigns.

The man went down with a yelp, and Cor grabbed him by the cloak, pulled him up, and pushed the hood off of his face—and froze. The King’s amber eyes blinked back at him, and he sighed.

“This,” Ardyn Lucis Caelum said, “is very unfortunate.” His long hair was bound back with a thong, and Cor was flushed as red as his curls as he scrambled off the other man, who lay sprawled flat on his back and waited for Cor to get up. Cor’s entire body was so hot he felt almost like he was on fire. Cor just kept staring as the King rolled to his feet awkwardly, dusting himself off. He’d traded his impractical formal toga praetexta for a soldier’s tunic and boots, dressed like he was about to go on a long journey - as if the chocobo hadn’t confirmed it. “I was hoping to sneak away unnoticed.”

“Your Majesty,” Cor stumbled, “I didn’t mean to—“ He had just tackled the King of Lucis to the ground like he was a common thief.

“No harm has been done.” The King dusted off the top of Cor’s head. “Go back to camp, and pretend you never saw me here. That’s an order.” Cor stared at the ground, and let out a long, slow breath. “On your way, soldier.” If he had been a little less loyal, a little more foolhardy, he would have obeyed the order without question; the King’s word was law. But as it was, Cor was perhaps _too_ loyal, and he could not listen to the King suggest this—

“Your Majesty,” Cor said at last, looking up at the older man. The King was already moving away from him to mount his chocobo and Cor followed, grabbing onto his bird’s bridle so they couldn’t gallop away. “With all due respect, sir, you need to remain with your escort.”

The King sighed and put his chin on his fist, then stared down at Cor. “I thought I ordered you to go back to the camp?”

“You did, sir, but I can’t let you just leave.” Cor dug his heels into the turf, and it wasn’t much against the chocobo, but it did slow the bird down. “The Consul was right to send you with a sizeable escort; these times are too dangerous for you to be travelling alone. It’s more than just daemons, sir.”

The King did not stop staring at him.

“The Consul,” Caelum replied, all put-upon grace, “is my beloved brother, and worries needlessly for my health and well-being. I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself, soldier, and he is aware of that. He’s _also_ aware that having me with an entire escort of soldiers is good for the sanity of the kingdom at large, but prevents me from healing to the extent I would like, so I’m not going to listen to him.” Cor dug his heels in harder, tried to jerk back on the reigns of the King’s chocobo. “Which is why I am leaving. You’ve no need to worry.” The King then grabbed Cor’s hand by the wrist and attempted to pry him off the reigns. “Should you be implicated in my flight, I’ll be sure your name is cleared. Now _leave_.”

Cor growled and stepped in front of the chocobo. They were far enough from the camp now that the lights of the fires were worryingly small. He shoved the bird, who squawked unhappily and thwacked him on the skull with her beak. “That’s not the problem,” Cor replied. “I am sworn to your name and to protect you, sire, and this will _get you killed_. You need to return to camp and safety. Send away some soldiers if you must, but travelling alone is foolish and will get you killed!”

The King straightened, and Cor quailed at the sight of him, regal and untouchable. “Are you trying to _question_ me?”

Despite the pressure of Caelum’s majesty, Cor held his ground. Even if his voice cracked as he answered.

“Sir, as your soldier, it’s my job to protect you, not question you. I understand why you’re doing this, Sire, but I also have a job to see you safely to Tenebrae.” Cor shoved on the chocobo. She squawked and thwacked him again, making his eyes water. “And that means keeping you with a proper escort of at least the Coronae guard.”

“Where do they _find_ men like you?” The King replied. “I’m going to leave, but if you’re insisting on coming, I can at least take you. Even if you _will_ be a wet blanket.” Cor’s breath caught in his chest. “You’d be better off running back to camp, though.”

“Your Majesty,” Cor tried again, and then they both froze as they heard a long, low growl. Cor turned, hand on the hilt of his sword, and his eyes raked the landscape. The King had chosen the new moon as his night to escape, and it was no doubt because of the darkness. Yes, because of that same dark now, Cor couldn’t see—

There was a whisper and crackle, and Cor looked up to see the King holding aloft one open palm, fire licking his fingers. He increased the size of the flames, and when the light got bright enough they both saw a huge behemoth staring them down.

The creature was easily larger than Cor’s childhood home, and it turned toward them, dark eyes seeking the light. Caelum pulled up hard on his chocobo’s reigns, his teeth bared, as Cor stepped between the king and the creature and drew his gladius, the blade glinting in the moonlight.

“Ride back to camp, Your Majesty.” Cor didn’t look away from the behemoth. “Sound the alarm.”

“Are you foolish or do you have a _death wish_?” The King snapped back, and the sound of his feet hitting the ground beside Cor was loud as he shoved on Cor’s shoulder. Cor didn’t budge. “You’ll die; you’ve no magic.”

“Yes.” Cor didn’t flinch from death. “It’s _my job_ to die for you, Sire. Get to safety.”

“Absolutely not—“ and with that, the King stepped forward, a flash of red light and the briefest shatter of glass the only warning as Cor saw him use the Armiger for the first time. He knew of the magic of the King, gifted to him and blessed by the Crystal, but had never seen it in use. Caelum summoned a crossbow to hand, the weapon heavy and ungainly for close combat, but the right choice for support, and he aimed it without hesitation, firing a bolt of red light straight into the behemoth’s shoulder.

The daemon roared; Cor stopped thinking and threw himself into the fray. He’d fought plenty of lesser daemons, and one behemoth, but never by himself. Normally he was with his cohort or his legion, but here it was only him or the King. He was used to relying on people, on his fellow soldiers—he would just have to rely on the King knowing what he was doing.

The beast roared, turning toward Cor, and he blocked the first strike with his sword, turning it away and shearing against the behemoth’s claws. He would need to get a good angle to shatter them so they could get at the creature’s vulnerable underbelly. Maybe if he went over—

Another crossbow bolt fired from behind him, taking the daemon clean in the eye, and it roared again and whipped toward the King. “Get out of the way!” The King shouted, and Cor instinctively ducked as there was a quiet whistle and then a blast of flame lit up the night sky, exploding against the behemoth’s side. Cor yelped in surprise, rolling on the ground as some of the embers struck him, flames sprouting on his tunic. They were snuffed out as he rolled in the dirt. He was back on his feet moments later, blocking another strike aimed at the King.

“Your Majesty,” Cor snapped, throwing the monster off and dodging back as its next strike raked at the air where he’d been, narrowly missing taking off his arm, “If you would _please_ return to camp—“

“Be careful!” The King shouted back, as Cor stumbled out of the way of another strike. Their banter was a waste of time and energy; they needed all their focus for this monster. Cor could only hope that a patrol would see the fire and come running, hoped that they would get backup. But for it being only the two of them they did surprisingly well, the King scoring grievous hits with his bow and magic as Cor kept up frontal strikes to draw the behemoth’s attention.

It could not last forever, though. The daemon was not stupid, and it knew the danger was not in Cor, but in the King. When that did finally happen, Cor had a split second with which to consider what he would do, and he took the best option available.

He tossed himself forward into harm’s way, slamming bodily into the King’s chest and throwing him backwards. The behemoth shrieked, and he took the beast’s claws directly to his chest. They sheared through his leather and iron armour like a hot knife through butter, and Cor screamed as they cut into his chest and between his ribs. The force of the strike made him bounce when he hit the ground; he felt a few ribs snap, one of his legs broke and bent strangely under his body, and his sword was thrown from his grip.

“Gods damn,” the King snarled. Cor gasped, blood dripping from his lips, as the night sky was filled with crystalline glass shards and blazing red light as the King rose into the air. The Armiger at its full power was a thing of legend, a force unmatched on Eos, and Cor saw now why that was. Weapons spiralling around him, the King fanned them out and launched headfirst into the monster before him, blocking strikes with three swords here and launching strikes with three swords there. It took only moments for the behemoth to fall, cleaved near in twain by the King’s blades, and he stumbled as he hit the ground, pushing himself up with both hands to scramble toward -

“No,” Cor coughed wetly as the King nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to come to Cor’s side. Caelum olding up his hand again, fire burning between his fingers. “Oh no.” Cor coughed, closed his eyes. He could not bear to look at the pain on the King’s face.

“You didn’t have to do that,” the King murmured, and the pain in his voice was near-tangible. “I had the Armiger; I could have protected myself.”

“All due respect,” Cor mumbled, choking on his own blood, “But I’ll not risk your life even for the slightest bit of surety, Your Majesty.” The King made a quiet, muffled noise, and Cor stilled as he felt the older man’s hands on his chest. His fingers were hot where they found Cor’s injuries, slick in his blood, and he took in shaky breaths as—he started to feel warmth, bright and soothing.

Cor opened his eyes.

He looked down, and saw that ghostly light was ringing the King’s hands on him instead of his earlier flames. His pale face was drawn with concentration as he pulled his fingers over Cor’s side, and in their wake his skin knit, his bones snapped back into place. Cor tried to gasp, to beg him to stop, but Ardyn had put his mind to it now. He was stubborn and impulsive and Cor could never have prevented him doing this, because Ardyn, Cor was learning, never listened to anyone at all. “Your Majesty,” he gasped, trembling, and Ardyn emphatically shook his head.

“You shan’t die for me this day, soldier,” he replied instead. “Not today.” He kept going, until Cor was as if he had never been hurt, and he sat up, fingers splayed over his side as the King’s chocobo approached, crying softly. In the distance, there was shouting as the encampment awoke, summoned by the King’s Armiger. “There,” Ardyn murmured, shaky, as Cor stared at him in awe. He tried to stand, and wavered, and collapsed.

Cor barely caught him before he hit the ground. The King moaned in pain, one hand pressed to his forehead. “Oh,” the King murmured, trembling in Cor’s arms as if he was freezing cold. “That’s unexpected.”

“Your Majesty?” Cor asked, trying to help him straighten as Ardyn seemed to lose even more strength, wheezing in pain. The King just leaned heavily on his shoulder. He was clammy with sweat, and Cor realised as he held the King up that the other man had lost weight since the last time he’d been this close. Then, in the river, Ardyn had been soft with fat, but he could feel more clearly the man’s shoulder blades, hipbones. When had that happened? “Sire, what’s wrong—“

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Ardyn slurred. “Just...very tiring.” He tried to straighten and failed, and Cor stood, carefully lifting the King so that Ardyn was sprawled boneless in his hold, an arm flung around his shoulders, face pressed into Cor’s bicep. “I’ll be all right with some rest, don’t worry.”

And then Ardyn doubled over and threw up.

“Right,” Cor said, holding him up to keep him from falling face first into it. “Sure. I definitely believe that.”

 

 

 

The King was ill for two days, so incoherent he could not be moved. In that time, there were only two clear instructions he was able to give from his fever-soaked camp bed:

First: the soldier who had saved his life was not to leave his tent until Ardyn could speak with him, leading to Cor being posted to a round-the-clock watch position at the King’s tent door; and

Second: Nobody was to tell the Consul. Which someone immediately did anyway.

On the sixth day of the King’s illness, he was well enough to move; they had marched on, setting up camp at a small village where there a local herbwife came to the King’s tent to see what she could do; and the Consul reigned up in camp. He was windswept and harried, not bothering to look around as he took off his helmet and dismounted his chocobo. Every soldier in the camp straightened, on their best behaviour with the Consul in attendance.

He was in as foul and dark a mood as a storm cloud, and Cor had nothing to fall back on but his training as he remained ramrod straight in front of the King’s tent door. The Consul stopped, his blue eyes flashing and his full mouth a scowl, as he looked between the guards. Behind his shoulder was Titus, Cor’s brother looking a mix of worried and furious.

“Which one is it,” the Consul snarled, fury tight in his voice. “Which one did my brother heal?” Cor hesitated, and then stepped forward, stopped at parade rest.

“It was me, Sir.” The Consul stared at him with an expression of suffused and barely-controlled rage. “Optio Cor Leonis, Fourth Insomnian.” The other man stepped forward, into Cor’s personal space. The King was the same height as Cor, with a willowy build, softened by his weight. His brother was a handspan shorter than Cor and slim, but deceptively dense despite it, his body a corded mass of muscle. When he grabbed Cor by his tunic neckline, hauled him down, it was with a strength that could easily snap behemoth bones like twigs.

“You,” the Consul snarled, spittle flecking Cor’s face. He winced. Salum shook him so hard his teeth rattled. “I will have you drummed out of the army. _Arrested_. Imprisoned. How _dare_ you.” His voice was raising. “You should have done your job and died out there, not demanded of him his—

There was a rustle, and the Consul froze as the King stumbled blearily out of his tent. His amber eyes were unfocused, his hair a tangled curtain of liquid flame. His tunic was half-off one shoulder, and his face mashed and soft with exhaustion and ill-gotten sleep. He was still pallid from his fever, but there was something undeniably etherial about him, a lightness to his fine eyelashes and his short stubble. He was like the dawn, when the sun was not yet at its precarious zenith, nascent and unformed.

He was, as always, utterly beautiful.

Salum dropped Cor immediately, turning to his brother to catch him as before he toppled to the ground again. Cor would have done it had the other man not been there. “Ardyn,” the Consul gasped, taking the King’s elbows. (Cor wondered, horribly, suddenly, what it would be like to have the privilege to call the King by his first name, to grasp him so familiarly by his forearms, skin to skin.) “You shouldn’t be out of bed, what are you doing, you _know_ what this does to you—“

“Hush,” the King gentled, a finger pressed to his brother’s lips, before he pushed Salum’s sweat-thick curls from his face. “Izunia, I chose to do it. He did not ask of me anything at all. Optio Leonis would have died had I not healed him.”

“He’s a _soldier_ , Ardyn, that’s his job—“

“But you know of my soft heart,” Ardyn murmured, smiling at his brother, let Salum lift the King into his arms, hold him tight. “I cannot abide such an action in my name, from him or from you. It is but a little fever; it will pass, and we shall both have lived through the encounter.” Ardyn laughed as Izunia got a hand beneath the King’s legs and lifted him effortlessly, the King draped over his shoulder, long, boneless legs pale and creamy where his tunic rode up. He was barefoot, revealing the gentle arch of his sole, the delicate line of his ankle. “You should be thanking the good Optio,” the King continued, sounding more than a little dazed. “’Twere it not for him, I should have spirited away during the night with Aurora, and gone unescorted on my way to Tenebrae. You should be _thanking_ the man, Izunia, not threatening him with court-martial.”

The Consul looked mutinously up at Cor, his eyes flat and livid still despite his softened demeanour toward the King, but did not berate Cor again. “We’ll see,” he growled, and pushed past Cor to enter the King’s tent. “ _After_ you’re well. You can’t continue the pilgrimage like this, Ardyn, you _must_ turn back to Insomnia—“ was the last that Cor was able to clearly hear as the men vanished inside, and he felt like he had seen something oddly intimate between the brothers, something he should not have been privy to watch.

As soon as they were gone, Drautos came over and grasped Cor by the shoulders. “What did you _do_ ,” his brother said, unable to stop a nervous laugh, and Cor clasped his shoulder in return. A sigh rattled out of him. “The Consul’s been in a right damn mood ever since he heard what happened.”

“I didn’t _ask_ him to,” Cor replied, more defensive than he wanted to be. “I even tried to stop him. But...”

“I know.” Drautos softened. “They don’t like to listen to anyone.” His smile was a wry one. “I know the Consul wouldn’t like to hear me say it, but I’m glad you survived.” He hugged Cor tightly, more performative with his affection than Cor was used to from his brusque brother.

“As am I,” Cor replied, although it hardly needed saying, hardly needed repeating. He’d nearly died, and had the King not stepped in, he _would_ have bled out on the ground for his monarch. He would not have regretted it, but he wouldn’t look a second chance at life askance.

 

 

_(Izunia’s arms are warm and strong around you, the leather and gold of his breastplate digging into your shoulder. He’s warm against you, and always stronger than you, always. “You need to eat more,” he chides as he carries you back to your bed, setting you down on the camp mattress, and you smile helplessly up at him. “You’re losing weight.”_

“ _It’s just a little,” you murmur, coughing as your head throbs. Like always, you’re too ill too stand, and forcing yourself outside to interfere was too much. Izunia pushes you back, his weight on your shoulders as he kneels at your bedside. His fingers skim the hairline scabs on your neck from your magic. He pulls the collar of your tunic aside to glance at your chest. “Izunia,” you chide, laughing. He’s looking for the tell-tale black that healing the Scourge leaves on you, bruising in your veins. “There was none of that. Just regular injuries.” You pull his hands away, try to stay them, but one hand remains on your throat as he brushes the hair from your face, worry heavy on his brow._

“ _Ardyn,” he murmurs, “you can’t just heal anyone for any reason whenever you want to. He’s just a soldier. You need to keep your strength up.” Izunia is always like this: he puts your life above everyone else’s, even his own. He seems to think that you can just save your healing magic for the_ right _people. Izunia thinks that healing every needy person you meet is wasting yourself._

_You have told him before that to heal only those that he deems worthy would be an abuse of your power. Everyone has a right to live, not just those that Izunia would not mind you trading a little piece of yourself for - but that is why you are the King and he is Consul._

_You would try to argue with him, but your head aches. Your chest aches. It is too much. You can’t bring yourself to argue with your brother on a point he will never concede._

“ _It’s fine,” you say instead of trying to argue it and cup Izunia’s hand in your own. You don’t so much lay down as topple over, graceless, and he bends over you, his blue eyes bright with fear. “I’m fine_ ,” _you reassure him, closing your eyes. You reach to cup his cheek. “You shouldn’t have come back, Izunia.” He grabs for your blanket, and starts to sort through the things on your side table until he finds the tea that the medicine woman left for you to drink, helps you sit up enough to sip at it._

_It tastes disgusting. “They need you. You need to be with the army.”_

“ _You need me,” Izunia replies, cupping the back of your neck, his broad, calloused fingers tangled in the soft hairs there. “I need to be with you.” You look up at him, then, at your brother, with his broad brow and the fear in his eyes as he watches over you, and you smile, clasp his fingers, kiss his knuckles._

“ _I will live, one way or another.” You have a few years yet, and many, should you hold your hands a little more. You shall not, though. Your one life is not worth the lives of many. “You must leave in the morning.” Izunia looks like he shall argue with you, insist that he stay. You put a finger on his lips. “I will be well enough to travel soon, Izunia. You cannot go to Tenebrae with me.”_

“ _Then you can stay in Lucis—“_

“ _You know I cannot.” His jaw tenses, a tendon visible. “You must fight and win a war, and I must go to Tenebrae. And when I return to Insomnia, I will recover the rest of the way.” Your acute illness will last perhaps a week or so, but you will not be well for likely a month or more. Especially since you have been healing in villages, and will heal more in Tenebrae, your gift traded for the presence of the Oracle’s Messenger, who is the true goal of your travels. “You may mother hen me then, brother.”_

“ _Fine,” he begrudgingly accepts, standing, pushing you onto your back. “I will stay but the night, then. And I won’t kill that foolish soldier.”_

_You find yourself smiling at the thought of the Optio; he stood up to you in a way nobody but your brother ever does._

“ _Certainly do not do that,” you murmur, exhausted, shutting your eyes. “He’s mine now.”_

_You do not so easily let the ones who touch something in you slip through your fingers.)_


	3. noon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He looked at Cor with eyes that could cut through him and pare his muscles from his bones as finely as a well-sharpened knife. “Do you,” the King began, reaching out, his fingertips all-but-brushing the tip of Cor’s chin, straightening him, “swear fealty to me?” It should have been impossible, but Cor could swear he felt the other man’s breath on his skin. “Do you swear fealty to the Kingdom of Lucis?” His fingers finally touched Cor’s face, gently clasping his chin, holding him still. “Would you die for us, Cor Leonis? King and Kingdom both?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey friends! mind the new tags. because theres some nasty stuff in here. not graphic, but. you know.
> 
> izunia lucis salum is a bad bad fuckin man

Cor was called in to see the King three days after the Consul left. Caelum was still weak, but had been well enough to ride his chocobo the last few marches; he had left her to one of the chocobo handlers that morning, though, and been seen in camp wrapped in a thick winter cloak despite the warmth and humidity of Eastern Cleigne. They were on the verge of the sea voyage across the straits to Altissia, and then on to Tenebrae, and Caelum kept the camp as a vigil at a cliff over the shore as he waited for good weather.  
  
“You are from Caem, are you not?” the King asked. His voice was husky, and his usually ruddy complexion was pale and flecked with sweat and sea-spray.

“Yes, Sire.”

“Will you be visiting family while we’re waiting?”

Cor shook his head. “Aside from my brother, I have no living family, Your Majesty.”

Ardyn hesitated before he spoke again. “Your brother is Titus Drautos in the Coronae, under my brother?” Cor nodded, and Ardyn’s voice grew more assured. “He has gained a great deal of Salum’s confidence in very little time. He told me that Drautos suggested your century specifically to accompany me on this pilgrimage.” Cor felt as bared as an open scroll, but he still nodded. “He must think you are very worth his trust.”

“I did not ask him to name me, if that is what you’re wondering. I was honoured by his suggestion, and even more touched that my century was chosen.” The King nodded, his chin on his hand. He had not shaved in some days, still recovering from his illness, and his beard had come in soft and full around his mouth and up his cheeks. He was only thirty-two, but there were grey hairs around his lips and over his chin. Cor tried not to think about how quickly the king was ageing.

The pilgrimage was not even half-over, yet he wore exhaustion as a mantle.

“It is rare that someone is as selfless as you were that night.” the King said at last, clearly thinking his words over. “I am indebted to you. You will, if it is not too taxing, remain my guard for the rest of this trip. I wish to reward you somehow, although I am not sure of how, and I will see about it when we return to Insomnia.”

Cor, unsure of what to say, settled on: “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

The King sighed. “It is I who should be thanking you, Optio. You did something very brave, and very foolish, and it would never have happened had I not been childish.” The King dragged his fingers through his curls. “I owe you my life, and it is not a debt I shall forget.” He gave Cor a gentle, tired smile, and Cor felt his heart stutter-stop in his chest. “You are dismissed, Leonis. Thank you for indulging me.”

“I—“ Cor hesitated, heart in his throat: “Any time, sir.”

 

 

They stayed near to two weeks in Altissia, messages coming from the front every morning and evening. During the day, the King would hold audience and see dozens, hundreds of people, and would collapse at night, feverish and exhausted, incoherent to the point of madness. The first two weeks of the land journey to Tenebrae he spent being carried in a litter, unable to ride, yet he somehow gathered himself together to be presentable for his brother’s messengers and send them away with the news that the King was not ill.

When they arrived in Tenebrae, the first full day was simply healing the Scourge; at the end of it, the King withdrew into his rooms and would see no-one. The following days were the same. He sent back his food uneaten and spoke hardly at all, his eyes sunken and haunted.

And yet, he still went out every day and healed, and healed, and healed. Until he was too tired to stand. Until his hands shook.

More than once, Cor saw the Coronae helping the King back to his chambers, and he would stumble in and sink to the bed that Cor saw in the sliver of room seen between door and wall. But Caelum continued visiting the Oracle, waiting for something, some sign. Cor did not know what _._

 

 

_(She comes to you at the end of the first week, when you have kept down no food in days, and you have been vomiting black bile so often that your throat is raw and rough with it. You awake to find her at the foot of your bed, ghostly pale in the moonlight, and your body aches with a dozen, a hundred refracted pains as you sit up. You wince and clasp your side where a biting, yawning sawing ache has been building since you arrived in Tenebrae flares like flame over your hip._

_She smiles at you._ You have been doing very well _, her voice in your head says._ We are pleased. _You do not respond, merely wait._ You came here with intention, did you not? _The Glacian does not open her eyes as she speaks, her black hair blending in with the dark of the room. The shadows of the night are always longer in Tenebrae; the heavy woods block out star- and moonlight in a way that they do not in Lucis, where the air is almost always open, the sky a bowl so wide that falling into it is as easy as breathing._

“ _Yes,” you say at last, sitting the rest of the way up, your hair tumbling around your shoulders, “Of late, Lady, my brother has worried for my health. Izunia is afraid that healing as I have been will kill me, rather than save our people. I came to ask if I might know if—if such a thing will happen.”_

It is not given to mortals to know the times of their deaths, _she replies, her voice heavy in your mind._ But in this case, I believe I can see the need. _She comes over and sits at the foot of the bed and presses her hands to your temples._

_Her fingers are freezing._

_When she opens her eyes, they are brighter than the moon. For a long time she does not move, and when she speaks, her words drip like honey from her lips. “A score, you have. That is all.”_

_You close your eyes, sigh in wordless relief. Twenty years—it is far more than some, and far more than you counted on._

_Her cold fingers brush over your forehead, and the worst of the headache that has lived between your eyes for the past month vanishes, melting away like snow in the sun._ Worry not, Healer, _she whispers in your mind again, and you cough black phlegm out of the back of your throat as she soothes the pounding in your temples, the ache in your shoulders and the sharp pain in your chest._ You were sent to save. Save, for it shall not lessen your allotted time. We would not have Blessed you to leave it unused.

“ _Thank you,” you whisper, as whatever she has set on you draws you back into sleep as dreamless and dark as the Tenebraen sky. “Thank you.”)_

 

 

After their return to Insomnia, Cor spent weeks dreaming of how hot the King’s hands had been on him that night he had saved Cor’s life. The way he’d glowed when he’d summoned the Armiger, bright as the sunset, how he had effortlessly taken down the behemoth that had batted Cor aside like he was so much dried kindling. The fact that the King had _thanked_ him for saving his life when really it was the other way around. The soft skin of his inner thighs that Cor had seen for but a moment, when the Consul had picked his brother up, the downy red hair there, that—

_That_ Cor could not think about, except in dreams, for to think on it while waking was surely treason.

The trip to Tenebrae, the thousands he had healed of both physical maladies and the Scourge, left the King too ill to rise for the better part of the following year, his official duties ceded to the consul but for dispatches and private meetings. (There were never talk of a coup; how could there be? Ardyn was still King, and nobody doubted his power or his rule.) When the King was finally well enough to rise, there were months of touch-and-go that Cor heard of secondhand from his brother - Titus raw and worried both for his newborn son and for the Consul’s fury over the King’s condition.

It was near a year and a half later that Cor was given a summons to attend to the King in a private conference. In his need to see the man again, he spared hardly a thought to the Consul’s cold rage; he simply followed his guide to the Citadel as if he walked on air.

It was not his first visit to the Citadel, but his first since before Tenebrae, and his first this deep. He was led past audience chambers, long, frescoed halls, heavy muslin curtains, guest chambers, entertainment rooms. Deeper and deeper, until suddenly he was walking down a half-flight of stairs into an open interior garden, flowering plants and fruit-laden trees surrounding peristyle-ringed walkways, an open pond sitting in the centre, lilies upon its crystal surface, reflecting the sky clearer than any beaten bronze mirror could.

Sitting at the edge of the pond and draped in a hanging hammock chair was the King. His toes trailed the surface of the water and scattered starburst ripples in their wake; his toga had half-fallen to his lap to expose the soft curve of his chest; his red hair had grown even longer than last Cor had seen, spiralling in ringlets over the bare tops of his breasts above the low-slung wrinkles of his tunic. His toga today was a deep, rich indigo with gold lacing through the wool, red instead of purple banding the edges that brought out the freckles dusting his arms. He’d kicked his sandals off to the black marble at the side of the pond, careless, elysian.

There were leaves and flower petals in his hair, tangled up with the golden laurels that he had, for once, set properly straight and not cockeyed in his soft curls. His face had regained its healthy flush, his freckles popping against his skin pale from his months indoors recovering, and he had—from the looks of it— regained a good deal of the weight he had lost. Upon their return from Tenebrae, his skin had hung in dry, loose folds from his willowy frame, but it was supple and full again. Cor breathed an inner sigh of relief; he had seen the hollows beneath the King’s eyes, the quiver in his fingers, dreamed of them in the months between their meetings. To see him himself again was relieving beyond words.

Cor stopped a polite distance away, stood at parade rest, and waited as the King called him over. “Optio!” He smiled, lazy, his full lips pink with colour; an artificial smile, but still soft. For a moment, Cor was almost certain that this, too, was a dream. It felt too good to be true. “Come, join me.” He came like an obedient dog to heel, and stood at the King’s side, hands loose and awkward at his side as the King lazily raised one hand. “Please, Optio, no need to feel out of place. You can push my chair if you need something to do with your hands; I can’t push myself _and_ dangle my feet in the water at the same time.”

It was frivolous, and silly, and slightly foolish. It was _not_ Kingly.

Cor very happily did it anyway.

This close, Ardyn smelled like fresh-crushed grass and the tang of sweat, of powder and perfume, of smoke and incense—and, frighteningly enough, still of the tell-tale herbal pall of illness, not yet as sloughed off as he made it look. As Cor pushed the other man, Caelum’s ankle kept almost bumping his, and every time it did Cor felt like he might just spontaneously catch fire and have to jump into the pond to put it out.

“So,” the King continued, murmuring. “You have been a soldier since you were seventeen. Optio at twenty-two shows more than a little talent for leadership. I was surprised when I learned you had not been made Centurion, but I suppose my brother’s influence can perhaps be cited there.” Cor had never said it, but he had suspected as much for some time. “Your superiors call you hard-working, if rash, and unusually loyal. Your brother has now served in the Coronae for some years, and with distinction at that, earning himself a place in the Consul’s inner circle.” The King did not look at Cor as he spoke, but instead down at the water, his finely manicured nails curled against one knife-sharp cheekbone. “Izunia has nothing but glowing praise for your brother—or at least, what passes as such, from him.”

When the King paused, he looked up at Cor, his amber eyes bright as a more genuine smile curled his lips.

Cor shuddered in his boots. His damn heart couldn’t take this.

“Your Majesty, if you will pardon my saying so, you seem like you’re going somewhere with this.”

“Oh,” the King laughed. “There’s no need to be so formal. Please.” He waved his hand, and his soft fingertips grazed Cor’s wrist. “I had you called here today because I think it is high time you joined your brother, at least in spirit. I wanted to invite you to come to the Coronae as a part of my own personal guards.”

Cor was pretty sure his heart just fucking exploded, then and there.

“Me?” He stuttered, surprised, missing a grab for the King’s chair and almost setting his hand on the other man’s wrist by accident instead, and that would have _actually_ killed him. “I—but—“

“You knowingly and willingly sacrificed your life to take a blow for me. Not many are bold or stupid enough to do that. Many in the Coronae are not that devoted. It takes a rare man indeed to throw away his life for another, no matter who that other is.” Ardyn paused, and his handsome face shifted. He was not frivolous; here in his inner sanctum, in his kingdom-within-a-kingdom, where he was sovereign above all, the King had made a decision. And Cor would have to live with that decision. “You saw firsthand how ill Healing is apt to make me. You also, more importantly, _understand_ that I cannot merely stay my hand when I have been given an edict from the Astrals to carry out.”

Unspoken: _it will get worse_.

“The men and women my brother has picked would rather retreat than advance. I appreciate their desire to protect me above all else, but protection is not what I need. A stalwart shield, a firm shoulder to lean upon, is worth all the more in the face of this reliance on stepping back rather than running forward. I am not so young as I once was, Optio, and I am afraid that as I get older finding someone who…”

“Is as reckless as you, Your Majesty?” Cor supplied, and the King laughed outright, a manic little giggle that revealed a glimpse of his true, devilish nature. It was ungainly, but Cor could have listened to it for two thousand years.

“Yes! Exactly. You have hit the nail on the head.” Ardyn gestured as if teaching a class, and Cor awkwardly smiled back. The Consul took on more ruling duties to let Ardyn focus on healing with every year that passed. No wonder he was feeling stifled, especially with the knowledge that this severe illness was only the first of many like it.

Ardyn could clearly read Cor’s face, and he sighed. “Don’t look at me like that; my brother does it as well. I have been blessed, Optio. I will use it until it kills me because that is the edict I have been given. There is no point in running from fate to try and earn a little extra time. The Glacian comes for all of us when our time is up. Even _I_ have no way to cheat death.”

What could he say to that? Nothing. Cor bit his lip, and nodded, closed his eyes. Just breathed. Got his grip back on the King’s chair and resumed pushing him again. At least that felt somewhat normal. Somewhat—easy. Simple. As naught else was.

He wanted to say, _when I was a child you saved my village_ and _when I was a child you saved me_ but neither one of those felt right; too trite, too over-told. Instead, he remained silent until the King paused, dragging his toes along the ground to stop his swing.

He looked at Cor with eyes that could cut through him and pare his muscles from his bones as finely as a well-sharpened knife. “Do you,” the King began, reaching out, his fingertips all-but-brushing the tip of Cor’s chin, straightening him, “Swear fealty to me?” It should have been impossible, but Cor could swear he felt the other man’s breath on his skin. “Do you swear fealty to the Kingdom of Lucis?” His fingers finally touched Cor’s face, gently clasping his chin, holding him still. “Would you die for us, Cor Leonis? King and Kingdom both?”

“Yes,” Cor whispered, voice hoarse and ragged. The smile the King gifted him with was so soft, dawn just beginning to break over the horizon, purple and gold and warm, so warm.

“I should hope that’s not something you have to do.” Ardyn let him go at last, giggling. “You shan’t die as long as I am here to heal you, and I should hope that I am able to do that for many years hence.” Caelum leaned forward, almost tipping out of his chair, took Cor by his cheeks and gently, all-too-gently, kissed him chastely in the centre of his forehead, his plush lips soft against Cor’s skin, over the scar the behemoth left on his brow.

With the kiss came a crackle of power, blushing over Cor’s skin. He gasped for breath, staring into space, struck-dumb by the force that rushed into him in that moment: tingling through his body like red lightning and fire, like the heat of the sun after standing with no shade on the black paving stones of the Citadel forecourt. He had heard of the Warp from the Coronae, from Titus, but there was a difference between _knowing_ of it and _feeling_ it like fire and wine in his blood. It made him feel like he could fight a thousand battles. It was as if the King had embraced him but not with his arms—the touch was on every inch of his skin, alive in his blood, hot in his bones, his whole body wrapped in the power and protection and _affection_ of the Lucian throne.

“There!” Ardyn laughed, letting Cor go. He could feel his face _burning_ as red as the King’s thick hair. “There shall be a formal ceremony later, of course, all pomp and circumstance. But this,” and he booped Cor’s nose, “is the real trick. Welcome to the Coronae, Optio. Or perhaps—“ he hesitated, and then murmured, voice lower and hotter, leaving a frisson of something dark and needy coiling low in the pit of Cor’s stomach, “ _Praetorian._ ”

Afterward, they talked of little; Ardyn coaxed Cor to try dipping his toes in the pool, his boots sopping from the water, which was pleasantly cool as the garden began to heat up in the afternoon sun. Cor meant to leave, but he kept not finding an excuse to. Ardyn seemed to be content with his presence, and Cor kept staring at the King—at the gentle slope of his wrist, or the way his ankles had turned bony in the last year.

“He has a wife now,” the King said at some point, without prompting, speaking of the absent brother whose return Cor knew the other man was waiting for. “A child on the way; an heir to the throne, I suppose. And here I am, sick half the time, and distracting him from ruling in my stead.” Ardyn kicked the water like an angry child.

“Your Majesty,” Cor said, hesitantly, “Nobody thinks the less of you for your illness. On the contrary, people are grateful you so willingly trade your health for theirs.”

“People,” Ardyn said, his voice strangely unreadable for a man who was so open and obvious, “are not my brother.” He tucked his curls back behind one ear. “I keep telling him that he doesn’t need to focus on me so much. I’m a man grown; I’ve no need of coddling. I keep on imagining how much happier he would be if he didn’t have to come back here and see me struggling, day in and day out.” Cor didn’t want to mention again how much the King had improved, how well his health seemed to be. “But he just...keeps worrying over me. Like picking at a scab.” Caelum paused, and laughed, a bright bubbling giggle that was all the more dichotomous with his words. “It’s hard to believe he’s the younger sibling! Usually, it’s the eldest who dotes.”

“My brother certainly does,” Cor said, hesitantly, trying to find something that would take the King’s mind off his recent illness. “He can never leave me well enough alone, even now.”

Ardyn smiled. “As well he should. You and your brother are both good men, but I think when Shiva weighs your souls, yours will come up the lighter of the two.” And then the King’s good humour passed like a cloud over the sun. As always, Cor noted, Salum was on his mind. “I spoiled him as a child,” he murmured.

He was looking at Cor, but not—looking at his eyes, but not seeing him. Seeing something else.

It was the first time Cor realised Ardyn could see Izunia’s eyes in Cor’s face.

“I should have known better, I suppose,” he finished at last, daintily closing the topic. “I’ve always been too soft-hearted, though. I never could learn when to say no.”

Cor knew it was not his place to do so, knew that it was not what he needed to say, but he very badly wanted to tell the King that there was nothing wrong with being soft-hearted. On the contrary, a gentle ruler was far stronger for Lucis than a hardened one.

Oh, how he wished Ardyn could see the goodness of himself, rather than the faults!

It was then that footsteps echoed through the garden from the peristyle, and Cor straightened, stepped aside, backed up to a safe distance. The King might have no sense of decorum, might define his personal space by breathes and inches rather than feet, but Cor was no King, and had no place here.

He and Caelum both turned, and if the King had looked pleased to see Cor, it was nothing compared to the absolute joy that suffused his features as he saw his brother. “’Zunia!” He cried, laughing, a hand thrown out for the Consul, who came, kissed his seal ring, bowed his head. “I was wondering how long I had until your return.” In the King’s wake came Cor’s brother, Drautos cocking an eyebrow at him that Cor mirrored.

“My apologies. The meeting ran a little late.” The Consul straightened, arms crossed. “They’ll be coming tomorrow to meet with you in person.” Caelum nodded, his hand tucked against his chin. “We shall speak on it later.”

“Very well.” Ardyn turned his attention once again to Cor. “Izunia, you remember Optio Leonis?” The Consul turned his attention to Cor, who remained unswayed in the face of his glare.

He did not miss the proprietary hand that the Consul wrapped around the King’s neck, his fingers fitting just under his brother’s ears, thumb brushing against the joint of his jaw. (He did not miss the little pleased flush that coloured the King’s high cheekbones, a gentle pink compared with his dark hair. He did not miss the way the two tilted toward one another, like orbiting satellites.)

“Yes, I remember him quite well. Have you a need to injure yourself further when you’re just now recovering?” Izunia growled.

Cor stood his ground, jaw locked. He had the favour of one brother; he would not run from the other.

“ _Izunia_ ,” Ardyn murmured, chastisement in his voice. The Consul stiffened, then relaxed. “You’ve no right to speak to him as such. That decision was mine and mine alone.” He straightened, and slid gracefully out of his chair, landing barefoot on the warm marble with a pleased noise low in the back of his throat. He bent over to right his sandals and straightened his toga, fingers carding through his long hair to fix it across his shoulders. “You shall have to learn to like him, for he is Praetor Leonis now.”

The Consul’s blue, blue eyes narrowed. His jaw tightened, his thin lips went white. “Titus!” He said, and Drautos immediately stepped to his side.

“Yes, Sir?”

“ _Praetor_ ,” the Consul spat the title like a naga did venom, “Leonis is your younger brother, is he not?”  
  
“I should think, Sir, the family resemblance all but gives it away.” Cor and Titus were nearly the exact same height—same square face, same ruddy complexion, same broad forehead. They had the same hair, both on their chins and on their head, and similar voices as well. Cor grunted as his brother clapped him on the shoulder. “I’d trust him with my life, Sir. Unquestioning.”

The Consul did not look like he believed it.

“And you’ve already said your oath?” He asked Cor, unblinking.

“Sir,” Cor nodded, hesitated. “His Majesty saved my life when I was undeserving. I would have you both know that I would have died without hesitation that day, and indeed, I did try to tell him to let me. I would do it unquestioning again, any day it was asked of me. It would be an honour to die for King and crown.”

Still, the Consul hesitated.

“He is my Praetor, Izunia.” Ardyn’s voice, usually as melodious and rich as well-honeyed wine, was as sharp in that moment as fine-bladed steel. “Not yours. Or am I yet too ill to make my own decisions about who can serve me? Shall we speak on that as well?” The Consul turned to look at him, and a silent war was waged there, ground conceded on neither side.

(The sun, Cor was reminded, could burn and blind as much as it could grow crops or warm the bones. The sun could burn a man’s eyes from his head, and the King was brilliant flame cloaked in the shadow of gentle sunset.)

“Of course not,” the Consul choked at last, backing down. The King’s proud chin was jutting out, and his brother bowed his head. “I merely worry about you overtaxing yourself, Ardyn.”

“No need,” Caelum smiled, and Cor could almost _see_ the blood between his teeth from his kill, from the bite he’d taken out of his brother’s hide. How could anyone think his man soft, think him gentle? He was a monster beneath that second skin. “I do know what is best for me. And what is best is Praetor Leonis, remaining at my side.” He gestured to Cor and Titus. “Besides, is it not fitting? We each have a favourite. A brother for each brother.”

They all laughed, but as they did, Cor felt something cold clawing at the back of his neck that reminded him of _danger_.

 

 

The following twenty years went like this:

Cor was promoted to Praefectus in five years, and his brother followed him two years later. Cor hand-picked a group of recruits every year, trained them, armed them, and they became the core of the King’s Coronae guard; what they had in breathtaking strength they matched in loyalty. Cor accompanied Ardyn to the Senate, stood guard at the door shoulder-to-shoulder with his brother, and soon the reputation became a brother for each brother: a sign of the loyalty that ran strong in their family.

On the King’s frequent trips out of Insomnia and into wider Lucis—and, occasionally, to Altissia and sometimes even as far as Tenebrae and once, memorably, to Niflheim—Cor would accompany him, organise his retinue, oversee his guards, and remain a staunch guardian by his side. On more mundane days, he would stand guard outside Ardyn’s rooms, escort him during healings, and do paperwork to keep the organisation of the Coronae running as smoothly as near ten thousand soldiers could be run.

On night duties, he would stand with Titus at the King’s door, and they would talk of Titus’ children, of the races, of the weather. (They would not listen to the sounds from within the bedroom, when they turned from the King and the Consul speaking to ragged moans and desperate gasping and Ardyn’s melodious, clear voice calling: _Izunia, Izunia_ ). And, afterward, when Titus and the Consul had left, Cor would wait for Ardyn to call him into his rooms and would help the King bathe, more trusted than any servant.

He would try to keep his eyes from lingering on the handprint bruises that the Consul left on Ardyn’s easily bruised skin at his throat and wrists and thighs. He would pretend he didn’t see the pale, crescent-shaped scars of nails dug into the hollows of the King’s jaw, in the soft flesh between his tendons. He would just hold his arms out for the King to balance on as he cleaned between his thighs, and would stare at the wall, and talk of nothing and nonsense to distract the other man from his broken heart.

It was an elaborate fiction, the one that the King and his Consul had, but Cor had learned long ago how to be discreet; he knew better than to comment on the possessive touches and the way Ardyn bowed his head, bared his nape. Even if he hated it.

Cor visited his brother and his family often, staying over nights in their guest bedroom when they shared a late shifts, waking up to the pattering of feet and shrieks of childhood delight at dawn. He fell into bed with a handful of men, but nothing that ever stuck; (and it was but a handful of men with red hair, and he knew his brother knew, but really was it a crime to favour thick curly hair that was as red as a bloody sunset—). His subordinates joked that he was married to his work, and it was never untrue. Cor loved Lucis (and the King), perhaps more than he ought to, perhaps more than he should.

When the King was ill, Cor was by his side, helping him run Lucis from his sickbed; when he was well he sparred blades with the other man, stood as his devoted guard, and promised himself he would do his best, and better. Be there, always.

 

 

_(These are the little things that stand out from your last twenty years:_

_The night Izunia comes to you, and begs you to lay with his wife. “The Astrals cannot take you without anything left to me,” he murmurs; neither you nor his wife like it, but you both do it anyway, and the daughter she bears looks like her father, blessed for all. She grows up tall, like you, and heavy-set, like you, and that is an easy enough resemblance to explain away - especially as you get older and sicker and the fat you’d had rounding you out in your youth gets lost to months spent bedridden and weeks where you can eat nothing but water and broth._

_You build Lucis to last. You were not meant to be King, but you have worn the mantle with pride, and will for the rest of your too-short life. It is not too hard to create a lasting legacy, to ready your heirs. To, as the years stretch on, pass laws that will provide for the coming generations while you slowly cede power to your brother._

_He catches on, eventually, and the row you have is worse than any you have had before, his heart broken and his words furious with spittle and bile with the revelation that you have been preparing to die. He tells you to take the mantle fully while you still can, to rule as dictator rather than King, but you have never been one for cruelty and controlling others._

_You will not do this._

_He does not speak to you for a week, and you cradle your sprained wrist to your chest all those days, try to hide it so nobody else sees it._

_Nobody notices. Or if they notice, they say nothing. Eventually Izunia admits that if you are to die at a time perhaps too-soon (you cannot bring yourself to tell him numbers or days, cannot bring yourself to give him the countdown the Glacian had given you that dark night in Tenebrae), they had best be ready for a smooth transition of power for he is not and has never been charismatic, and men will not follow him and die for him as they will for you._

_You travel, and heal, and build in the city. Aqueducts, public forae, rebuild the temples of the Astrals. And you lay sick and insensible in bed for days between._

_You push yourself too much, you know. But you do not have as much time as some, and you cannot let it slip by. You work too hard and too often, and a pattern sets itself through the years on the nights you remain at the Citadel, when work and duty both do not call you forth. You stay up late with Izunia when his wife and children can spare him—talking politics, arguing, laying out hopes and dreams for the present and the future._

_Wrestling as brothers do, and then wrestling as brothers do not._

_And on these nights, it is your Praefectus Leonis who takes you back to your rooms, helps you clean up, who keeps your secrets of more than just your brother. He is always there for you. It goes beyond simple duty; you know that he does not have to stay at your side this much—and yet he stays without complaint, despite the filth he has to deal with and the strange situations he becomes privy to in your personal life. He’s impressed himself onto you like an imperial seal in wax._

_Sometimes you wonder what you did, if anything, that seared yourself onto him like a brand. He is one of the few who makes something burn too-brightly inside of you. You find fewer and fewer of them as the years go by, as your illness confines you more and more to the palace,_ _as what was once a love for life and daily joy and travel and healing dulls to something mundane and aching deep in your breast_ _. Those few_ _friends_ _you_ _still_ _have drift away as you are confined to bed or work, distracted by your travels and healing,_ _no longer of any use to them as you consolidate power away from you so that the kingdom will not fall when you do_ _._

_Cor always stays._

_There is something of comfort in that.)_

 

 

The year that Cor turned thirty-eight, the King had his first epileptic fit. It happened in the middle of a Senate session, and the heavy dull sound his body had made when he’d fallen, seizing, to the ground would stay with Cor the rest of his life. “Get a healer,” Cor had barked, sending a Coronae running, and he’d pushed Senators out of the way.

The Consul was already kneeling beside his brother. He had turned the King on his side and held his head steady in his lap. “He’s all right,” Izunia said, not looking up at Cor. “As soon as he stops, help me lift him.”

They carried the King into an antechamber when his shaking stopped, and the Consul lay him down upon his toga, remained by his side as people came and went. Ardyn wasn’t sensible for nearly an hour; when he did finally murmur, his questions were slurred whispers he addressed to only his brother, fingers grasping loosely for Izunia’s.

It was soon after that he officially passed the succession to his brother, to rule as his regent in the declining days of his health, a man well enough to be the leader that Lucis needed and not a husk of a human, the better part of his soul and mind and body turned to the whims and wills of the Astrals. He let the Consul take the reigns then, to lead Lucis in his stead, and turned his hands instead to the path he had been set upon by the gods.

 

 

It was a cold day for late April in Cor’s forty-first year when he looked up and found Consul Izunia Lucis Salum standing silent at his doorway. Cor rose immediately and snapped to salute, hand over his chest. “Sir,” Cor said, pausing as the Consul gestured to someone outside the room and shut the door to the Praefectus office, hesitated, and then threw the bolt. “Is there something wrong?”

“This,” said the Consul, sitting down, “does not leave these walls.” He looked tired and ill, a pallor had struck his tan cheekbones. The grey in his hair was surprisingly visible in the light from Cor’s taper.

He looked, uncomfortably, like his brother.

“Has something happened?” The Centurions who had been on duty had not mentioned anything awry. “I’d not heard—“ Cor regretted, immediately, not having been on duty with the King, regretted staying back to focus on paperwork and guard rotas.

“No. I came here as soon as I was sure he was all right. He...I’ve rarely seen him as focused on seeing me do something.” The Consul slowly stretched out his legs sitting on the stool across from Cor’s seat at his desk, laced his fingers over his lap, and unspooled a story that left Cor chilled to the bone, frightened and wordless and _raw_.

It had been a healing day—that was why Cor had let the King go with just a regular rota of guards. Of late, his healings had left him exhausted and ill afterward, on shaky legs that could barely support him, sometimes unconscious. He no longer did them in public, amongst scads of people who would come running to his open arms. Now, they were performed in private, in comfortable rooms in the Citadel, where if the King collapsed he would have a couch to collapse _on_ , rather than smooth marble and cold stone.

The last of that day’s petitioners were two street orphans, one with a case of the Scourge so far-gone that her brother had been forced to carry her in. She’d been blind with ichor, her eyes gone, spitting black ooze and dripping on the floor.

The King had healed worse cases before; Cor had seen him do it. He’d once healed a soldier who had been infected during combat when the man had been nearly a daemon in truth, fingers clawed and hooked. It had left him ill for weeks after, but it had been done.

This time, it had not worked. The orphan girl began screaming and whatever was in her blood flowed back into the King, who collapsed insensible, foaming at the mouth. His rolling eyes were as scourge-black as her own as he shook through seizure after seizure. He had been with only Salum’s eldest son, the guards sent out of the room to keep from frightening the children, and when the girl had tried to _kill_ the King, the prince had had to—

Salum’s voice grated like a rusty hinge.

Had to kill the girl, to put her out of her misery.

When the Consul was done speaking, Cor got up and very slowly poured them both a drink of unwatered wine. Neither spoke. They had known each other for the better part of twenty years and had never grown to like one another, but they could at least tolerate the other’s company, work together if they must.

For His Majesty—either of them would do anything.

Cor did not sit down. He stared out the window at the Coronae camp below them, at his men and women at their drills. He drank.

“How is he?” he asked at last.

The Consul grunted noncommittally.

“He woke briefly before I left. Eyes were still black, kept spitting up bile. He begged me to get you. So here I am, getting you.” Cor drank. “We can’t keep letting him do this. It’s killing him, Leonis.”

“I know,” Cor agreed. He drank. Rarely did they see eye to eye on anything—even more rarely when it came to the King. But ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, you couldn’t spend almost fifty years healing everything from sprained ankles to terminal illness to the Scourge without suffering for it. Cor had known it was coming for years; they all had. Just. None of them could bear to say it until now. “But if we tell him to stop, he’ll have none of it.”

Caelum’s pride was his greatest flaw. Once he had a course, had made up his mind, he would stick to it—he could rarely show weakness, and his illness hurt him most there. If either one of them suggested he stop, he would swear at them roundly. He’d already spoken to Cor of his fears of his brother putting his foot down and forcing him to stop like an ill-behaved child.

“No,” the other man agreed at last. “He won’t.” Salum drank. “My brother really did get the worst of our father’s pig-headedness. You could take him to water but you damn well couldn’t make him drink, even if he’d been in the desert for a month.” The sound of the Consul putting his cup down was loud in the silence. “I, for one, have no desire to be on the receiving end of his fury if he went off about being asked to stop.”

“I won’t do it,” Cor replied. They both sat there in silence. The Consul sighed.

“I’ll...” Cor turned around to see the older man scrubbing a hand through his hair, teeth gritted. “I wish he’d just _listen_ to me,” the other man snarled. “I’ve always known what’s best for him!” Cor hardly agreed, but did not voice it. “Ever since we were children. If he’d only learned to listen to me sooner, maybe he would have never—“

The Consul hesitated, shook his head. “I’ll make him,” the other man settled on at last, looking up at Cor with eyes as blue as his own. “One way or another. I won’t see my brother die like this.”

“If that’s what you want, Sir.”

Cor wished he had the backbone to step in and stand up for the King, to put himself between the brothers. But to do that would almost certainly end in his death—and he would do more harm than good with that. He’d be better off aiding and abetting another day of bruises on Ardyn’s worryingly-narrow biceps and forearms, another night of sleepless dark bruises under his eyes and teethmarks on his lips, than he would be dying and leaving Ardyn without him. He had precious few loyal retainers and friends left; Cor would not out of foolishness rob him of another. He hesitated. “Shall I return to the Citadel with you? If His Majesty asked for me—“

“You’d best, yes.” Salum pounded his fist on Cor’s tabletop. “I’ll solve this,” he swore under his breath, fervent and furious. “One way or another. The damn Astrals and their damn gift have robbed me of my brother enough. They shan’t have him like this. Not now.”

Cor was unlucky enough to hear the resulting argument when it happened two weeks later, when the King was well enough to have it, locked out of the King’s private chambers. He heard the resounding sound of Ardyn’s anguished shout and saw the broken wrist he nursed and let heal as nature willed it over the next month—it left Cor with nightmares. He could never stop seeing the bloody, livid fury on Izunia’s face when the man had stormed out, the way Ardyn had been crouched on the floor in a sprawled, boneless heap, his radiant halo of hair spilling tousled around his head and shoulders, holding his injured hand, his greying red hair thrown over his face, revealing just how pale he had become, his darkening blood making his skin seem all the more inhuman, all the more grey, tears tracked bright over his skin.

Cor heard the following night, too, standing stoic and nauseous beside his stone-steady brother when Ardyn had cried and begged for forgiveness, the beatific gentility in his voice to as his brother had—

Cor tried not to think about it.

Failed.

 

 

_(You and Izunia come to an agreement, after that. He begs you. Pleads. You rarely see him so weak, so frightened. He cradles your injured wrist in his hands, his fingers too-gentle over the still-painful break. He cannot bear to look you in the eye—of guilt or fear or repulsion, you know not._

_You will cut down your healing. He will rule. You will stop arguing._

_It seems so simple, when he puts it that way. And you….you are so tired. So very, very tired._

_You cannot bring yourself to fight back, especially when he always knows best. You are killing yourself, even if he does not know how true, how soon._

_Your days are suddenly empty. It’s just you, your guards, and Izunia. With the reigns of your power gone, Senators and priests you once saw weekly vanish into the ether. They’ve no need to visit you; especially not now that you’ve spent years slowly siphoning your power to be nothing but a figurehead, whose martyrdom will be the easier to stomach for it. When you’re well enough to leave your bed, you pace your rooms. You read. You visit your gardens, and tire after only an hour or two, and you lay down your sword and bow, almost certain that this shall be the last time._

_You are too old, now, to fight._

_Your room, which once felt large and luxurious, a sanctum of your own, feels like a noose tightening around your neck. Inch by inch._

_Your days are empty—your nights are not. At first, you are afraid of him, but Izunia’s wrath has gentled, and he kisses your wrist as if all is forgiven, and he calls you beautiful. You wonder what he sees in you, too-thin and too-ill and ragged and worn with the ill health that the Astrals gave you in return for your gifts._

_You memorise the ceiling’s cracks._

_You count the marks notched on your bedpost._

_You wait.)_

 

 

In the coming months, Cor would often spirit the King out of the citadel when his brother was gone, ingratiating himself further by omission when he let Caelum go out in disguise and crouch down in squalid street corners, lifting his hood to reveal his tell-tale curls and finding his arms full of sick babes and injured elders, pregnant women in desperate need of relief. He would come to Cor’s apartment ostensibly to visit, to get out of the palace somewhere his brother would approve of—somewhere the Consul would send him unchaperoned—and would spend the evening serving the people of Lucis, those with the Scourge who could do nothing but beg for relief, that Cor let into his cramped rooms one by one.

And Cor lied for him, and never questioned it. He’d be damned no matter what he did, and he’d rather be damned for protecting the man who owned his oath than he would be for aiding and abetting his imprisonment. For that was what it was, of course, hidden under fine words like _convalescence_ and _recovery_ and _for his health_. Everyone knew that nobody visited the King for political purposes any more. If people came, it was because they wanted to see him. His plan had worked without a hitch—the government ran entirely without him but for his approval and appearances at public works, the cursory attendance here and there to open a Senate session, never to stay.

He was a figurehead, and they’d done away with any need for him before his corpse had even been still yet. Cor could never quite tell if it was all that he had wanted it to be.

He wasn’t sure the King knew for certain, either.

One evening, when he was called into the King’s private bedchamber before his shift ended, after the Consul and Drautos had bid their goodnights, Cor snapped to attention and stared at the man where he lay on his couch, wrapped in thrice the number of blankets he needed for the weather, a brazier at his feet running too hot and high for early fall. Sweat dripped down Cor’s temples, but the King was shivering as he read a letter which he held at arm’s length to compensate for his failing eyes; he still held his wrist oddly akilter, it had seemed to not heal quite right. The currant-red curtains that canopied his bed had been loosed and hung heavy, the muslin enclosing him and no doubt making him all the warmer. The windows had even had their heavy wooden shutters put up, instead of being open to let in the crisp fall air. “I have received a rather urgent letter from Tenebrae,” he explained, not looking up at Cor.

Cor could see the King’s hair unspooling over his chest. It had grown long since he’d been confined. It was down almost to his shoulder blades now, thick ringlets and corkscrews all aglow with red and silver like liquid flame in the firelight. He did not look at the sharp, bird-narrow lines of His Majesty’s clavicles, the sagging skin of his weight loss, or the red, livid bitemark that was purpling just above his ever-present necklace of fingerprint bruises the size of the Consul’s hands. Instead, Cor stared at the wooden post at the edge of the other man’s bed, and counted, unseeing, the nineteen tallies that had been notched into the wood there, running perfectly parallel down the side of the post, each one board-straight. He didn’t know what they meant, but it was something—anything—to look at that wasn’t the King’s vulnerable dishabille.

“They have had the Oracle speak to Shiva and Leviathan on behalf of them for some needs, but they request I intervene with the Archaen. There is some political impetus, you’ll understand, and it’s pressing. My brother and I have spoken on it,” well, _spoken_ was one word; Cor’d heard no speaking, just begging and pleading, but perhaps it had been in their whispers before and after; “and I shall be going to Cauthess in two day’s time to intercede with him on behalf of our Tenebraen cousins. My brother wished to go himself, but he cannot understand the Astrals’ speech. That, only myself and the Oracle may do.” The King set down the letter and looked at Cor. “Hand-pick your best men, Marshal. My brother wants a full century with me, and an honour guard of lictors, Coronae, and your crack troops besides.”

“And myself?”

“With me, of course. I hope you will understand it is not my intention to travel to Cauthess so heavily protected; the Archaen would not approve of that sort of entrance into his territory. We will leave the greater portion of the escort at Lestallum and continue on with your vouchsafed men and women to the Disk. Titan has little and less love for humankind, and I for one should not try his patience with scads of mortals crawling all over his precious meteor. What my brother is unsure of except secondhand shall not hurt him.”

“Is that all, Sire?”

“Yes. Give me that list tomorrow, Cor.” Caelum tucked his hair back behind his ear, pulled his blankets closer to beat back the chill. “And prepare to leave as soon as we have ironed out the necessities of such a travel arrangement.”

 

 

They were ambushed on their return from the Archaen: it had taken the King many hours to commune with the Astral, and their return had been delayed until after dark. His Majesty had been held high up in Titan’s broad palm, the Archaen’s answers unknowable to all save Ardyn, who stood tall for someone so small and insignificant in comparison to the unfathomable greatness of a God.

It was not men and soldiers that surprised them, but a veritable army of bruise-dark daemons that oozed out of the ground like blood from a wound. Without the century that Salum had insisted accompany them, even Cor’s best fighters stood little chance in an all-out contest of brute strength. They made a retreat backwards toward Lestallum, to the rest of the century and to the safety of burning city lights, the rear guard turning into the front guard to beat off the monsters that hounded them, and Warp-ghosts in Salum’s blue and Caelum’s red filled the night sky like burning coals as the Coronae took to the air, using magic as their greatest weapon. The sounds of shattering glass and screaming haunted the air with every harried step, with every inch of distance in retreat they gained paid for in blood and fire from the King’s outstretched hand.

_Chaos_ was hardly the right word for it.

One by one, the Coronae fell, fighting against insurmountable odds, until only the King’s honour guard was left. When the first of those fourteen were struck down, a middle-aged woman whom Cor had known since he’d come to Insomnia (pinned to the dirt with the lower half of her body ripped away) Cor saw a flash of red in the corner of his eye and pounced as Caelum raced toward the fallen woman, the battle forgotten in favour of her injuries. He grabbed the King’s bicep and dragged him away from the dying soldier, Ardyn’s heels dug into the dirt.

Ardyn was shaking. They were _both_ shaking. “We have to go,” Cor told His Majesty. Caelum twisted in his grip, trying to wrench away, straining back toward the injured woman.

“There’s still time,” he replied, manic. He did not seem to know he was speaking. “Leonis, let go of me. There’s still time, I can save them—“

“No,” Cor had to drag him back, had to pick the other man up under the arms when he wouldn’t budge. “Sire, you can’t!” There were thirteen soldiers and him left, now. Fourteen to make sure Caelum make his escape. Another one fell—a young man, his blond hair spattered with viscera as he went down screaming, chopping the Red Giant that held him to pieces with his sword as the daemon squeezed the life out of him, one clench of its meaty fist around his torso every time he tore open it’s neck. Ardyn tried to launch himself at the man. Cor caught the King, pulled him away from the fallen as he kicked and screamed and writhed like a rabid beast, thrashing his legs and straining every muscle in his body against Cor’s grip. “You’ll kill yourself!”

“No!” Ardyn shrieked. “I have a responsibility—I have to—“ Cor took one of his flailing fists to the face; the King’s golden signet ring caught him over the eye, leaving a bleeding graze. Still he pulled the other man on, tossed him like a ragdoll over his chocobo’s saddle. “Leonis!” the King shouted, anguished.

His remaining guard was forming up between them and the daemons. There was no hesitation. They did not once look back.

“Go!” One of them shouted as Cor threw himself onto the saddle behind the King. He grabbed Caelum by the belt of his tunic, his jaw tight and clenched as he put his weight on Ardyn so he wouldn’t fall, the King writhing like he was possessed. “Get His Majesty back to Lestallum!”

“Cor!” The King yelled, voice cracking, as Cor kicked Aurora into a sprint, her _wark!_ sudden and loud as she took off and away from the combat. Ardyn clung to her saddle and to Cor’s leg to keep from falling, but he kept screaming. “Cor, let me off! Let me off! Let me help them!”

“You can’t heal the dead, Ardyn!” Cor snarled back. None of them could do anything for the dead, for his men and women lost to blood and death and daemons. He could do nothing but be certain that the King saw the daylight.

Healing took more of a toll on him every time. The more grievous the illness, the worse the rebound. Healing what no human could recover from? Back from death? Surely, that would be the last straw, one push too far. It would kill him.

They never even made it to Lestallum with that many daemons on their tail—in the end, they made it as far as a campsite, glowing brighter blue than the stars in the absolute utter darkness of the night. That was all that saved them from gnashing teeth and grasping claws and another set of ignominious deaths. Cor practically threw the King into the circle of runes and scrambling after him, dragging Aurora in behind them, his chest and lungs burning with panic and adrenaline as he let her reins go. Aurora circled them and screamed as daemons threw themselves against the runes and burned in the protective magic, hissing and dripping bile that evaporated instantly off of the Astrals-blessed stones.

Cor crouched beside the other man, checking him over wordlessly for injuries, as Ardyn stared first out at the daemons, then back at him, amber eyes haunted. “I’m fine,” the King snapped, once, and then a second time, shoving Cor’s hands away as he tried to right himself, “I don’t have a _scratch_ , Praefectus.”

His hair was a ruin, tangled and thrown around his face and shoulders in a chaos of curls. He’d lost his crown of laurels in their fight and flight, and without it, he looked almost too-simple as a man. His high cheekbones were flushed angry and dark, the hollows of ill-health below them cast in sharp relief by the glow of the runes upon which they sat. He glowered at Cor when he did not stop trying to check for injuries, and thrust the sole of his sandal in the centre of Cor’s chest to kick him off with more fury than the Praefectus thought he had expected the King to show, knocking him flat on his ass.

There were perhaps two feet between them, but the gulf felt as wide as the straits between Lucis and Altissia.

“How _dare_ you,” the King snarled, and the force of his words left the air full of the thrum of glass and light and fire, magic dripping from his voice like venom from the fangs of a snake.

Cor had seen the King summon the Armiger only a handful of times through the years, but he could practically smell it in the air now. Magic lanced around the King’s prone form, little blood-red bolts of static sparkling around him, lighting him up in sunset hues. They lit up off of the runes below them, and his hair lifted from his face and shoulders with it. “How dare you speak to me like I am a confused child who does not know what’s best for him! I am your _King_ , Praefectus! Not some man you can use and abuse as you would a slave!”

Cor’s patience finally cracked, and he shouted, louder than he meant to— “You can’t heal the dead, Sire!” He winced as glass crackled and the King’s Armiger formed around him, swords appearing out of thin air and hanging pendulous in the air, deadly steel and shattered glass, each blade aimed at Cor’s bared throat.

He had never flinched for anything else with the King.

He did not now, either. He softened. “It’s not worth dying for. Please.” The King was shaking, staring at him, upper lip curled in wordless fury, his bright eyes wet with unshed tears of livid white-lipped rage and anguish at the dead they’d left behind them to bleed into the dirt and grass. “I know you wanted to save them, but—“

“I know what I can or cannot do, Leonis, better than you or my brother could ever hope to—“

“Do you?” Cor’s voice cracked. He grabbed the King by his shoulder, felt the sharp line of his bones under his sagging skin. “Do you really, Ardyn? Because you’re pushing yourself, you’re _killing_ yourself like you don’t matter! Do you think any of those men or women would want you to die for them? They took oaths _to you,_ Ardyn! Not the other way ‘round! You’ve never been able to heal the dead.” He shook the King, hard, and for his trouble got another kick square in the chest, fell back to his elbow. “The dead are dead! They’re supposed to stay that way!”

“And so what if I am killing myself?” the King shouted back, and Cor had never loved him more than in that moment, sick and tired and exhausted and with blood from the wounded all over him, his cheeks flushed and his amber eyes bright as the sun itself, staring into Cor. He was an apparition of power and a force of nature and unstoppable as the rain or tides, deadly as any blade, more beautiful than the sun itself. Force and power and— “Does it really matter, Cor? I’ll be dead soon regardless of who I do or do not drag back from the brink of Shiva’s door, and good riddance!” He laughed, and it was not his soft giggle, but a manic, hysterical shriek of anguish and pain. “I may as well see myself off this mortal coil having done the best for everyone I could help rather than staying in my ivory tower where my brother can watch over me like an unruly dog, unharmed except by those who purport to love me! If the dead must stay dead, then let me die and join them, Leonis!”

It left the hairs on the back of Cor’s neck raised, left him sick with the taste of metal in his mouth.

He did not know what to say to that.

They did not speak again once during that long, dark night.

 

 

Upon their return to Insomnia two days later, the King did not hide away in the Citadel as he had been, pinned down despite his better judgment, out of deference to the worries of his family and his guards. He stormed the Senate, bright and beautiful in his fury, demanding answers and freedom and the laws he had wanted passed for years. Cowed and frightened by the force of nature that was His Majesty, the senators fell into line, never able to stand up to that raging creature. The Consul left on a pilgrimage of his own: when Bahamut in the crystal would not give the answers he sought as to his brother's absolute refusal to live, he knew the Oracle would. On the third day, he rode at dawn for Tenebrae.

And so began the last year of Ardyn Lucis Caelum’s life.


	4. sunset

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Then, you had thought the Gods would merely smite you down and raise him up in your stead._
> 
> _You think, hysterically, how merciful that would have been compared to this._

_(Your bed is cold and empty for three lonely months. You try not to pine. You fail. It is hard, after all these years, to finally be the one waiting for someone to come home, rather than the other way around. In those months, the kingdom seems to fall into line like you never let it range free and unfettered, and sycophants come once again to beg and plead and borrow at your door._

_And you let them, because it is nice, sometimes, to be pandered to._

_Cor Leonis guards you unspeaking, unable to meet your eyes, and you cannot yet bring yourself to forgive him. You know it is not his fault he made you live, you know you cannot possibly blame him—the gods make jealous fools of mortals all, and you are no exception. You, perhaps,_ most _of all, with the taste of original sin that accompanies your every step. They cannot forget who and what you are. They cannot forget how you were created._

_You would not want them to, even if they could. You are your mother’s son. You would not wish to be anyone, any_ thing _, else._

_At last, though, you cannot keep your nose upturned another hour longer. You cannot keep refusing him his rightful place beside you, for pettiness becomes a dead body not. Remember the dead as the living, they say, for decay rots away all goodness a skeleton once had. You are not so far from that yourself._

_He comes to you_ _when called like a dog to heel_ _, chagrined, and cannot meet your eyes as he stands before your throne. He holds his place at your side every day, every hour, but before you without the veil of master and subject he is as bashful as a punished child, and it_ aches _that you have spurned him so from you. When all others have turned against you, he has always stayed._

_He cannot be at fault for the machinations of gods, who care little for the lives of men._

“ _Rise,” you say, gently, standing and limping down the steps to his side, touching his short-cropped hair, the nape of his neck, bared to you without a moment’s worth of hesitation. He trusts you. Too much, you think. Too much indeed. “I would have you hold your tongue no longer, Praefectus. You did no harm against me. Perhaps it is I who should learn the art of apology, not you.”_

“ _Thank you,” he murmurs, “Your Majesty.”_

_You do not have it in your heart to tell him you have finally relented in your fury because of the letter you have folded into hard-creased vellum and placed beside your breast, caught in the folds of your tunic. For the image of your brother, now apparently grey-haired as a man thirty years his senior._

_They ask to hold a triumph for Izunia’s return. He rides into the city on a quadriga, garlanded in flowers and laurels, and the procession lasts the better part of the afternoon. You sit on the Gemonian Steps, the black marble hot and blissful against your aching bones, a canopy held above your head by servants, Cor Leonis sturdy and staid and silent at your side. You drip with sweat as the afternoon wears on to its highest point, your thick curls hanging damp and humid, your too-fair skin flushed with the heat no matter how many Blizzard spells you cast to ice your skin and the waterskin from which you drink, your heavy wool toga too-starched, it seems._

_But, it has been many months since you were properly warm. You had forgotten how nice it feels._

_At last, the procession delivers your brother unto you, and he climbs a hundred stairs with an aching slowness that is not at all like him until he stands just below you. “Oh,” you whisper, looking at him, your heart breaking. He looks older than you now, his dark hair all grey, his tan face lined and worn. He has lost weight, he stands strangely._

_He had written that he had made a deal, a trade._

_Your brother, for all his faults, is all mortal. Perhaps, that is why he has so many you do not. Your father was beloved both of gods and of men, and Izunia’s mother was as mortal as the man she loved, unlike yours. It is not given to humans, flawed and grasping for_ anything _to cling to, to hold the power of the gods in their hands. The crystal answers to none but its maker, and you are all that remains of her._

_Izunia had written to tell you that he has traded half his life to gentle what remains of yours. You hate it._

“ _Brother,” he says, standing three steps below you. His blue eyes are ringed already by the same scars that blacken your face, trailing beside your right eye. His are silver, the same liquid metal as his hair. “I hope you have not been aggrieved terribly without me.”_

“ _No,” you say. Your voice does not sound like your own. You take a step down, and he takes a step up. You meet halfway, and you cannot remember last when you did. It has been, of late, all too oft either all or nothing with you both. There has been no middle ground._

I wish you had not done this thing, _you try to say, but the words bottle up and die out unspoken in the back of your throat._ I wish you had simply let me die, and let the line of Lucis end with it.

_You do not say that._

_You make not a mockery of his sacrifice._

“ _Thank you,” you say instead, and your smile feels so very false upon your lips, a painted statue. You grieve, so hard you feel as if your heart is fit to break. “I have missed you.”_

_He does not say as much, but that night he comes to you, and for the first time in many years he makes love to you, takes you apart into the baser pieces of yourself, and you cry into his shoulder—concave, now, his muscle tone sloughing off like dead skin—when you come, hold tight to the back of his neck, pray unspoken that this night is the end, and you will wake up naught on the morrow._

_It is too much to hope for._

_You wake up, and life goes on._

_One day at a time, toward whatever death awaits.)_

 

 

“Praefectus,” the King asked suddenly, one evening as he sat on Cor’s floor, dandling a child upon his lap, cooing to the little girl as he peeled the Scourge out of her one breath at a time, “When was the last time you took a vacation?”

Cor, who was helping a woman of perhaps seventy summers down the stairs, paused, glanced back at the king, started to say something, and quickly helped the grandmother down to the ground floor before he returned to find the King hacking black bile and laughing as he did so, the girl as healthy as could be on his lap, as he passed her back to her father.

“I haven’t, Sire,” Cor replied. “Unless you have specifically asked to not have need of me, or been called away by other duties, I’ve been by your side to a day these past twenty years.”

Caelum sighed, waved one graceful hand. His hair tangled in loose curls around his shoulders, and he dabbed at the corner of one eye as it dripped black tears. “Oh, I’ve always need for you, Cor. But a sword used until its blade is dull and worn is of no use as a sword at all.”

Cor prickled.

“Are you saying I’ve lost my touch?” He asked, sharper than he would have liked, and the King paused, leaned forward, set a hand against his knee, and looked up at him. His amber eyes were bright and soft, the veins in them still stained black from healing.

“No,” he murmured, and Cor couldn’t stop staring at his lips. They were red, he was flushed—a fever, no doubt. “No, Praefectus. Not at all. I merely worry for your health. Even your brother takes breaks; he has been on leave since my brother returned from his pilgrimage. I am certain he would not see it ill if you joined him, for at least a few weeks.”

“Your Majesty.” Cor bent down to gently take the older man’s elbow and help him, swaying, to his feet; Ardyn wrapped one arm around his shoulders and neck and draped himself over Cor’s side. Like this, Cor could feel his entire body, the bony line of his hips and thighs and the dip of his waist. He had lost weight again. “Caelum—“

“Please,” the King looked at him, long red lashes soft against his freckled cheekbones. “For me, Cor. A week or two, nothing more. Just rest. I cannot...” He trailed off, and pulled away, helped the father and daughter out, and then returned.

He stood in Cor’s kitchen, back to him, facing out the small slit windows above the countertop. He wasn’t wearing his usual tunic and toga of rich black and deep, ochre purple. Instead he was in just a simple brown tunic and a heavy beige toga that he had borrowed from Cor, one of his winter ones, draped ‘round him more as a blanket than clothes. It made his hair seem even brighter against those dull and featureless colours, like the flame of a candle that flickered and sputtered and desperately, _desperately_ , strove not to go out.

“What I am about to say does not leave this room,” he started, softly. “You must promise it to me, Cor. Swear it, on Lucis, on your family name. Protect me, this one last time, even though I do not deserve it.”

“I...” Cor hesitated, and then saluted. “Of course, Sire. I swear it.” He was not sure what he expected the other man to say now; not sure what required such secrecy of him, after all he had already given in his life to his King. Perhaps a revelation that Ardyn would _finally_ oust his brother from power. That, maybe, the King was going to do something to bring the Senate into line. That maybe there had been a coup or an assassination plot he had learned of, or—

“Let’s get to the point. I’m dying.”

He said it without inflection. Simply; easily. Stated like it was as plain as the sun rising and setting. The honest, unfettered truth. Any thoughts that had been in Cor’s head before died off without a sound, his mind going blank even as his heart shattered.

Cor sat down on the nearest chair. Hard.

“Soon,” Ardyn continued, still not looking back at him, hands curled around the lip of Cor’s countertop. The yellow streetlamp light outside cast through his hair and left it orange and gold rather than maroon, and showed just how many silver threads there were now. Silver and iron through his halo of flame. “Quite soon, I should think. Before the end of summer at the latest. I feel it more every day, Cor. My bones are tired. My body aches.” Cor stared at his tabletop, and his eyes blindly traced the shift of the whorls in the wood. Like there were answers there.

Ardyn cleared his throat. “Do you remember, Cor, when I took that trip to Tenebrae to visit the Oracle, all those years ago?” He paused then, and laughed, a rich, wine-thick chuckle low in his throat. “You and I met then, properly, if you remember.” _Properly_ , like Ardyn remembered they day they had first met. He didn’t, of course. Cor knew he didn’t.

“I do,” Cor’s voice came out choked when he spoke. He still could not look up. “Clear as day, Sir.” He had never, in all the years between then and now, forgotten the feeling of Ardyn’s hands on him, and the way he’d watched the other man’s eyes that night. They’d lit the world up and seen right through him. He’d never been so in love.

“I did not go to Tenebrae to see the Oracle, Cor. I went to see the Glacian. For an _intercession_. To ask if I might know how long I had. You know my brother, Cor. He hates the idea he might be robbed of me. I had thought, at the time, if I knew how long I had, then perhaps…I might no longer have to worry that I would be taken too soon.”

“And?” Cor didn’t feel like he had spoken, but the word tumbled out of his mouth nonetheless.

“I was given a score of years, Cor. No more and no less. Twenty summers have been and gone since that night Shiva spoke to me, and now my time is up. I don’t know when or how, Cor. I just know it’s going to happen. And all things considered, it will be painful, and slow, and as horrendous and as ugly as all that’s come before.”

“Ardyn,” the King turned around to look at him when Cor said his name, and his smile softened at something he saw in Cor’s face. He looked tired. He did not look sad. He had accepted it, of course, just as he had accepted everything else the Gods had seen fit to curse him with. Just like all else that had blackened his life this, too, he would take without complaint, in stride, as nothing but his due. “You can’t—truly be all right with this? You—there’s still so much you can _do_ —“

“I’ve been dying for a long time, Cor.” His amber eyes were sunken in dark circles above his cheekbones, and he looked older than he ever had, now that Cor knew. It was like something fundamental, some bedrock, had shifted and exposed a gaping wound that bubbled lava beneath. He was tired, Cor knew. But he’d never before now known just _how_ tired. “It gets worse every day. It is not meant given to mortals to know the time of their deaths, is what the Glacian told me. I have been granted a boon, Cor. A gift from the Astrals. I just...” As he spoke he looked away, like he couldn’t hold Cor’s gaze. Couldn’t handle what he saw there. “You have remained staunchly by my side for a lifetime. You have seen enough— _done_ enough for me. You have endured more for me than any man should for another. My burdens are not yours, however, much I know you may wish they were. For all these years, I have let you carry more than I should.

“You cannot carry this one, Cor.” Ardyn’s voice cracked. “This is one burden only I may bear. You need not watch me suffer through the end of my life. Please, go away, and let it happen on its own, in its own time. This is not an order from your King. I merely...request it. Just this once more.” His voice softened to a whisper, a plea. “ _Please_. I don’t want you to have to see me in the ugliness of decay. I want someone— _anyone_ —to remember me as I was. Not as I am. Not as I will be.”

Cor could never deny the man anything. Could never say no. Even when he should have.

“If that is what you wish,” he said, hoarsely, at last. His voice cracked on it. For a moment, he expected Ardyn to smile, but then the other man’s face crumpled like wet cotton, and he sagged, pressed his hands up over his eyes, his shoulders caving in. “Your Majesty—“ he was up without thinking, crossing the tiny kitchen in two, three strides, to clasp the other man by the shoulders. “Ardyn, is something—“

“It’s. Nothing’s wrong.” He laughed. It was as hysterical as it had been that moment that night at Cauthess; for the first time Cor realised that Ardyn had known, even then, he was dying. That when he had insisted he go back, he _try_ , that it was not out of some foolhardy demand to save everyone.

He had been trying to cut it short. To bring it to a close. To suffer, a little less. And Cor had stopped him, out of duty, robbed him of that chance at peace.

“I’ve never said it aloud before,” Ardyn gasped, eyes wet.

In private, the King was an ugly cryer. His nose ran, his skin got blotchy, he howled and sobbed. Cor had stood by his bedroom door for years, silent and staid, through more than one bout. He had, on occasion, even held him through it. This was one of those times, and as Ardyn broke down in his arms, face pressed into his shoulder, grief and (perhaps) some kind of relief, all he could think about was—this was it.

The end. For all of them.

 

 

_(When you were young, you had sort of romantically, at least at the time and in your own thoughts, considered that maybe you would die in your brothers arms. Something suitably heroic. Something good enough to stand up to the way your mother had passed. You had thought maybe you would fight back against the Astrals for what they did to her. Maybe you would take the Scourge from him and let it kill you instead, in inches rather than miles. Maybe there would be an attempt on his life, and you’d take the sword in his place, bleed out with his eyes the last thing you saw._

_But you were young and foolish then, and now you have been ill for many, many years. In your fading years, pain has become more of a constant companion than any other. More than your brother. More than Cor._

_More, sometimes, than yourself._

_You do not wish for romance and drama now. You wish only for relief._

_You once thought there was something deeply, deeply sad about dying in your sleep. To close your eyes, for a single night, and slip away. To be found still and cool in the morning, motionless, your chest caught forever mid-inhale. There was something so very sorrowful about that; to never have the chance to say goodbye, to never be able to be certain,_ sure _, that it was the end. To merely go into that good night without intention._

_But that was then and this is now and now and you can think of nothing better now than to close your eyes, and slip away, and know nothing and no-one more. You cannot think of a better, a finer death than that. There is no pain and suffering in that. Your goodbyes are already said, or if they aren’t, they cannot be. It is something that you cannot stop, that you cannot halt. It is ease. It is_ rest _._

_You pray, every night, as you have since Tenebrae twenty years before, that death will come for you in your sleep, like an old friend. You miss her and the cool touch that once smoothed your brow. You are ready for her as soon as she is ready for you. You merely ask that, after all you have endured, the Astrals be gentle. The Astrals be kind._

_You are going to die. You know this. Your people know this. Lucis knows this. The Senate knows this. Your brother knows this. Cor knows this. Your family, nieces and nephews and aye, even your daughter, know this. Everyone knows this. They have known it for many years. They have known it with more surety in the last few._

_The Astrals know you are going to die._

_It is just a matter of_ when.)

 

 

In the end, Cor let Drautos wheedle him into going on a family trip down to Caem to visit the farm and their few remaining distant relatives, with plenty of time on the way there and back to spend out in the wilderness. “I worry about my kids,” Titus had confided to his brother on more than one occasion. “There’s no fresh air in Insomnia. They need it to grow properly.” So he and his brother spent the better part of a month on foot teaching his nearly-grown children how to live in the wild, the skills they’d learned both in the legions and as children on a farm. No doubt the boys would follow in their steps, and soon would enlist as soldiers, to fight in the name of king and country. Titus wanted them to be ready when they did.

Caem had been blessed with a cool summer, and Cor spent their few days there down at the King’s port, in the chilly overhang with the splash of the surf throwing salt into his face and hair. He thought about how Ardyn had been, before, twenty years ago, when he’d stood on the docks and watched the tide and waited for the straits to calm for passage to Altissia at last.

Had he known, even then, he was dying? Or, without the Glacian’s confirmation, had he only guessed?

At last, though, they turned back toward Insomnia when a messenger came racing into town, looking for the Praefecti. Urgent news: the King had fallen badly several days before, and was faint and delirious. The Consul needed them to come home. The _King_ needed them to come home.

The mood turning back to Insomnia was subdued. It was on one dreary grey Duscaen day that Titus pulled his chocobo up beside Cor’s, his craggy face creased and consternated with worry. “You don’t want to ride on ahead?” He asked, watching Cor carefully, his brown eyes sharp. “I’d have thought you would be pushing your bird to a lather and yourself to insensibility to be at his side.”

Cor laughed, but it was without humour. He only _wished_.

Titus narrowed his eyes at him, stared. “...Cor?”

“I would,” he replied, “had His Majesty not explicitly ordered me away.” Titus was still staring. “He told me to go with you. He wanted me out of the city.”

“Why?”

Cor hesitated. Ardyn had made him promise, that day in his kitchen, to not speak of it to another soul. But Titus was his _brother_ ; Cor trusted him above and beyond anyone. Even the King. He reached out and grabbed the other man’s reins and pulled him forward, away from his wife and children, until they were riding together out of earshot, heads tucked in low together, their chocobos brushing feathers. “He’s dying,” Cor said, his voice hushed.

Titus pulled so hard and sudden on his bird’s reins that he jerked backwards, squawked indignantly, and turned around to thwack Titus with his beak. “ _What?!_ ” He almost shouted it, and turned it to a whisper at the last moment, heated and furious. “What do you _mean_?”

“He’s dying.” Cor repeated. “Titus, he told me not to tell anyone—you can’t make this into something.” His brother was staring at him, clearly in shock. “He sent me away because he didn’t want me to have to see him suffer. He didn’t want my last service to him be _watching_ him _die_.”

“How can you be so _blasé_?” His brother sputtered, stunned. “Cor, you should never have left! Let alone still be out here, when he’s—“

“He’s my king,” Cor said softly. He couldn’t look his brother in the eyes. He felt more guilty about it than he could ever say. “He’s my _king_ , Titus. If he tells me to leave, I’ll leave. It’s not my place to question him. If he wants that peace—it’s all I can do to give it to him.” It was silent between them for a long time as they rode. “Titus, he sent me away so I wouldn’t have to stand vigil at his bedside over however long it would take him to sink into death. It’s all I can do to make sure that I fulfil that promise, and let him go in his own time. He doesn’t want me there, a spectre, standing over his deathbed and itching with worry.”

“If you say so,” Titus replied at last. “If you’re sure.” Cor wasn’t.

He stayed anyway.

 

 

When they did finally reach Insomnia, it was to find the King still very much alive; just desperately ill and recovering from near-death. He welcomed Cor back, coughing feebly, exhausted. What few conversations they had at first were delirious things, and as time went on Ardyn at his best would be perfectly coherent—at his worst, he’d vomit black bile and speak in the language of the Astrals, which no human but he could understand. He’d lost the rest of what expendable weight he had, and was hardly skin and bones. He leaned, tremulous, on his brother’s arm, let Izunia take his weight, and seemed sad: bereft, aimless, because he’d lived.

The following weeks were spent at his bedside or door, helping the King improve when he was well enough to, and otherwise counting his laboured breaths. His health, so deeply shattered, seemed to recover almost inhumanly quickly, and he was soon back on his feet, working, at Senate meetings, visiting and healing. He still slept little and less, and when he spoke to Cor, there was something _haunted_ about his words and voice. There was something on his mind he did not see fit to share, that was bothering him.

It wasn’t Cor’s place to ask. Even if it was, he didn’t have to. Cor could guess; it was not hard. It was written in how Ardyn would stroke the twenty scratches on his bedpost, and how he would look away rather than meet Cor’s eyes whenever their conversations turned from the mundane to Cor’s worries for his fatigue. How even when he helped him walk from room to room, his fingers would curl loose around Cor’s wrist, as if expecting him to dissolve into air (or, worse, perhaps because he could not tighten them further.)

Even on one of the nights the King spent in his office in the Castrum, tangled up in blankets and with his feet on a brazier, they spoke little, and none of it of import. Questions about rebuilding the Coronae after Cauthess, questions after Cor’s family, about his health. When Cor did ask about Ardyn’s health, about his brother, his answers were evasive and loose, sketchy. He would change the topic so fast and so fluid Cor would not even realise he had done so until he’d lost the thread of the conversation completely.

He didn’t press the King. It wasn’t his place. But sometimes, he missed their old rapport. He missed the man being truthful with him.

He hated to be a burden.

A month or so later was the cusp of the week before public elections—governmental positions needed filling, senators running for office, proconsuls for the further states of Lucis, all needed to be voted in by the Lucian tribes. To officially ring in the coming weeks of campaign speeches, there was a public offering at the Temple of the Capitoline Astrals, and below on the Rostrum, a speech.

Cor and Titus, on duty, had taken themselves away from the thick of the crowd at Titus’ suggestion, and were on a nearby raised bridge, so that they could better see down over the crowd. While the better part of Ardyn’s personal guard had been decimated by the disastrous trip to Cauthess, enough remained that, when combined with the rest of the Coronae, the King and Consul were well-guarded. His speech (which Cor had heard in practice) was thoughtful, if subdued, talking of duty and loyalty; after he was done, Caelum had to step aside, out of breath, clearly weak. Even as recovered as he was, his strength was not what it used to be. In his absence, the Consul stepped forward to take the Rostrum, to convey his own thoughts to the gathered crowd in the forum, jostling and mashed near to a crush.

“Do you think Caelum has told him yet?” Cor asked his brother, not looking away from where the King and Consul were standing. He knew Titus had not told Izunia; his brother had sworn to him on their mother’s grave he wouldn’t, and Cor trusted him.

“I’m sure he hasn’t.” Titus shook his head, broad arms crossed over his barrel chest. “You really think he would? The Consul would refuse to believe him at best. At worst...no, he hasn’t told him.” Cor closed his eyes for a moment.

No, he wouldn’t, would he.

Cor, at their distance, could not hear what was being said. He could only see the body language the Consul had—abrupt, jagged. He did not face his brother. However, after a moment, he turned toward Ardyn, opened his arms, pulled his brother in close, and—

Cor knew the sound and look of the Armiger better than almost anything. Glass shattering, Salum glowing blue as the ocean, and then Izunia thrust his arm forward and Ardyn doubled over in his hold, his face slack with surprise. Cor could hardly breathe, one hand wrapped around the railing of the bridge, staring in mute horror down at what was below as the Consul stepped away, Izunia drawing his sword in one fluid motion out of where he’d impaled his brother, held the blade up in the air.

It did not drip red, scarlet and bloody. The metal was stained with black gore, dark and viscous as ink, that ran down the blade to the hilt, dripped in hot lines over Izunia’s hand and wrist. Each drop that fell to the wood below them was somehow almost as loud as a thunderclap.

“The Astrals have spoken to me,” he said, and Cor could hear him shouting, clear as if he was standing beside the other man. Perhaps it was magic. Perhaps it was just the adrenaline. “My brother is not that which stands before you! My brother, beloved by us all, has passed on into death— _this_ is his shell, unholy with the Scourge! That which has robbed us of so much robs us now of _him_ too!” Ardyn was stumbling, one hand pressed to his stomach, his toga sliding off of his hollow shoulders, staring at his brother, staring at his hands, coated with his own blood. Like he could not believe his eyes

“We must see mercy done!” Cried Salum, his voice raised above the rabble. “Cast them out! For every daemon the body must die a death, a hundred deaths, a _thousand_! We must kill them all, lest they transform and kill _us!_ ”

Cor was halfway into drawing his own sword to Warp when he felt Titus grab him by the elbows, haul him back down. “You _can’t_!” His brother hissed, fingers white-knuckled in their grip. “Cor, you can’t!”

“They’ll kill him!” Cor cried, struggling like a fish on the line against his brother. “They’re going to _kill him!_ ”

“They’ll kill you!” Titus rejoined. “They’re going to riot! If you go down there, you’re a dead man!” He was right—the crowd, which had been horrified, was beginning to understand. Black blood meant the Scourge. The Scourge in the one man who could heal it meant there was nothing anyone could do. He had to die. That was the only other cure for those taken. You either killed or you were killed; a daemon taking Ardyn’s strength and magic in Insomnia could raze the city to the ground.

Cor and Titus watched as the King looked at the mob, looked at his bloodied hands, looked at his brother shouting for his head, and then turned and in a flash of red light Warped away to reappear, stumbling over his own toga and blood, as he raced up the Gemonian steps towards the Capitoline temple up above.

Cor took that as his moment, wrenched away from his brother’s white-knuckled hold, and threw himself below into the fray, racing after his King. He barely made it into the crowd shouting for blood before someone shoved him, he stumbled, and chaos broke out. He never even made it to the steps before someone elbowed him in the cheekbone, someone else kicked him in the shin, a crush and the crowd surged against him, and Cor went down, trampled, crushed, hands over his face to protect him. The last thing he was sure of was the toe of someone’s boot, cracking him in the temple, and then—

 

 

_(The first thing you had done when you had been gifted the Warp was to share it with your brother. Izunia, with you in this as in all things. His blue, blue eyes had lit up when you’d passed it to him, and the colour of his magic had been properly blue to match. You had spent days as fledgling adults, still hardly grown into your togae praetextae, in the weeks before your coronation, laughing and laughing as you threw yourselves from rooftop to rooftop around the city. He had always followed your lead back then, letting your sharper eyes scope out the best paths, the quickest space between two points._

_You’ve always been better at finding the way forward than he is, and that’s true now. Even if the gut wound he gave you, as sudden and fast as lightning, leaves you gasping for breath with every stumbling step as you lurch your way up to the temple where it rises above you, copper rooftop glittering in the sun. You dig your fingers into the wool of your toga, press it against your stomach, to staunch the bleeding, if only a little._

_Your head start, your faster Warps, won’t keep Izunia or the mob off you forever. If your family and your city have turned against you, then at least—_

_At least you have your gods._

_When you reach the temple on the Capitoline, the doors are open from the sacrifice you and your brother left only hours earlier. His hands had been shaking too much to take the haruspicies, trembling where they held the fine paring blade of the knife. They have been shaking since his trip to Tenebrae; like as not it’s from whatever the Astrals did to him to take the burden of the crystal. You had taken his hand in your own, strengthened, straightened it. Together. In this, as in all else._

_The liver you had cut free had been shrivelled and blackened, smaller than a thumbnail, hard as a nut. You had been unable to say what it meant. Now, you think you know._

_Usually, the priestesses are waiting, tending to the altar, keeping lit the incense and whispering prayers to the Astrals, taking donations from devotees, sacrifices and gifts that can grant prayers and blessings. But today, even after as important a sacrifice as the one just done, the temple is empty. The torches are all doused. The naos is empty and dark, the pronaos in the distance abandoned. Nothing moves inside. It is as still and silent as death. You have seen corpses with greater animation._

_There is a single woman waiting for you, halfway up the stairs. Her eyes are shut, and her hands are folded before her. Her dark hair is the same colour as the blood your stomach is gushing into your hands, and you stumble, tripping over your own feet, to fall to the ground before her, stare up at her in supplicance. She does not open her eyes as she looks down at you, but slowly walks down the steps to stop, he toes just barely touching your fingers._

_When she cups your face in her hands, her fingers are as cold as you remember. Like ice, but worse. They feel as if they could freeze the skin and flay it off your bones._

“ _Shiva,” you whisper, voice shaking, as you stare up at her. “Please.” You know not for what you beg. “Please, my lady, sanctuary.” Or, perhaps, her promised quick death._

“ _A score you were given,” Shiva replies, her thumbs brushing over your cheekbones. Gentle. Gentle as freezing to death. “And a score it has been. You know it as well as I. Sanctuary is for those who have yet time left.”_

_You understand immediately._

_Of course._

_Horror covers you like a blanket of snow, the chill inching back from her fingers where they grip your jaw. “You knew,” you whisper, voice shaking. “You knew this would happen. You saw. You know it wouldn’t be the Scourge, you_ lied—“

It becomes you not to rail against your destiny, _the Glacian’s voice booms in your mind._ Meet your fate upon your feet like a man, Ardyn Lucis Caelum, or meet it crawling upon the ground as an animal, but meet it nevertheless you must. You have taken the Scourge into you, swallowed it whole as did the earth your mother, and you must now pay.

“ _Was this always my fate from the beginning?” You sob. You cannot believe it. You must not. You—surely— “All along, even though I did as you commanded?”_

_The Glacian replies: “You of all understand the needs of the many over the needs of the few. You have taken the curse of your own blood into you, purged it from the world. And now, it must die with you. You cannot live, and it cannot live without you.” You cannot look away from her cold, emotionless eyes. She is as heartless as a block of ice. You do not understand how you never saw that before now. “You knew what must be done, son of Lucis. You have yourself killed those who have gone too far.”_

_When you were fifteen, and your brother lay dying, you had begged in the name of your wronged mother to let them take your life in place of his. You had traded your mortal soul, what of it you ever even had, for his. You had known then that you would have traded your life for his, without hesitation, without consideration, in a heartbeat. You had always assumed that to heal the Scourge meant to die._

_Then, you had thought the Gods would merely smite you down and raise him up in your stead._

_You think, hysterically, how merciful that would have been compared to this._

_Shiva helps you to your feet. You pick up the sword you dropped from the stones of the stairs, let it take your weight so you may stand, hold it loosely in your hand. It is tradition, history states, that disgraced kings fall upon their weapons, to end it with dignity, to save another from the crime of regicide. (Fratricide.)_

_You do not have a choice. You do not have the time._

_Shiva is gone when the mob crests the stairs, and you let your sword go back into the Armiger from whence it came. Their noise, the building riot and fire, is so loud you can feel it in your bones. But before they reach you, there is motion behind you, where moments before there was nothing but the ghost of your faith, and something strikes you hard in the knees, knocks you to the ground._

_A hand tightens in your hair, pulls your face up. Another under your chin._

_Izunia leans down into your ear and hisses, “Did you really think I’d let anyone else finish you?”_

_You look up at him, and you are crying. You can see your tears rolling onto his hand; they’re grey, like your blood. The Scourge finally has taken you. He is right to kill you. He should have done it sooner. You only wish he had done it in private. In shame, the way families are supposed to commit suicide. With a pillow over your face, perhaps, and promising under his breath that he still loved you._

“ _Brother,” you whisper, “please, Izunia. Please. Make it quick, please, I cannot—“ There is something unreadably cruel on his face. You have seen that expression on him before. He wore it the night he broke your wrist, what seems like decades ago. You sob. You do not know what else to do. “Please.” Your vaunted silver tongue, for all the good it has ever done, has failed you. In the face of death, you’ve nothing else to give but one last, helpless try to sway him._

“ _Don’t look at me like that, Ardyn,” Izunia whispers, cupping your cheeks in his hands, as Shiva did moments before. His hands are scalding. Against your still-chilled skin, they_ burn _. “You think I want to do this?”_

_No. Yes. Maybe. You don’t know, not with him, not any more. “Please, while there’s still time, ‘Zunia, just end it now—“_

“ _The Gods have willed it,” Izunia replies. His voice is steel. It hurts more than when he put his sword through you. His upper lip curls into a sneer; disgust is writ plain on his gaunt features. “None of us can demand more from them. Certainly you of all know that. Stop looking at me like it’s my fault. Do you think I want this?” You shake your head. No, no, of course not, how could he? But he still looks at you with his face a rictus of horror. “Stop using my brother’s body to beg me. I’ve no love for monsters in sheep’s clothing.”_

_He puts his thumbs to your eyes._

“ _Stop looking at me,” Izunia whispers, as he presses down. “Stop fucking crying at me, Ardyn. Stop. You’re too old for that. I can’t fucking handle it when you look like that.” He presses. Pushes, Up. In._

_You scream, and scream, and scream._

_The last thing you ever see is your brother’s face, tense, lips pursed in a white line of fury and disgust. The last thing you ever see is his eyes. Blue, blue, as blue as the sky. Bluer. They’re the same colour as his warp, but lighter, and you’ve watched them a dozen, a hundred times, in all his moods, from the day he was born until—_

_It doesn’t hurt. Not really._

_You’re almost grateful. It means you don’t see the faces of the crowd before Izunia throws you to them, like raw meat to the lions.)_

 

 

Cor woke up alone, bruised, head and chest aching like bells rung too hard. Night had fallen. The moon was just leaving the horizon; it was red tonight. As red as the King’s hair.

_Ardyn_.

He could only think of the king’s terrified face as he fled, the betrayal in his hunched, bloodied body as he had stared at Salum. Sickness and despair had already stripped him of so much; would he even be denied a clean death, a proper burial?

He limped up the Gemonian steps, which in the dark of the moonlight, revealed the fires that had swept through while Cor was out. More than one body, trampled to death in the riot, stoned, simply expired of heatstroke, littered the marble. Here and there was a Coronae, one of his own men, still in uniform. They had died at their posts. Cor ignored all of them, too woozy and ill and nauseous from the strike to his head to stop and rest, and instead followed the last path he’d seen the King take. Built by the generations of eld in black marble as fine as that of the Citadel, the steps had seen much and more bloodshed in the past forty years. Those tried and found wanting (or worse) would be executed by the Consul in plain daylight. Cor, as a young recruit to the Coronae, had done more than his fair share of clean-up duty. He’d never thought he’d be looking to see if the King’s body bad been thrown there, to rot and bloat in the afternoon heat.

Eventually, up at the Capitoline temple, the doors shuttered and barred, he found the pool of dried blood that cascaded over the steps of the temple like tar. It was dry. Around it were pieces of ripped toga, purple turned black under the moonlight. Fragments of skin and flesh. Handfuls of hair discarded to the tiles.

For a long time, Cor had to sit down and just breathe, his face pressed into his hands, to keep from. Just. Coming apart.

The trail he had followed ended at the Tarpeian Rock, a cliff that towered some hundred feet above the street below. It had been used as the execution grounds for traitors since the city had been built; corpses there were left to be picked apart by the scavengers, a message to all those who would follow in their footsteps, until there was nothing but bones and dust left. The edge of the cliff, rock and scrub, was covered in footsteps dried in Ardyn’s blood. This time, sitting down, muffling his face in his hands, would do nothing.

He dry-heaved his empty stomach until his shaky head swam, cried hot, ugly tears into the back of his palms, and, slowly, painstakingly, went to climb to the foot of the cliff.

 

 

_(You’re not sure how you’re alive. The mob, once loosed, tore you to pieces. Izunia didn’t even try to stop them. You’re certain that souvenirs will be made of your clothes and hair for decades, if not hundreds, of years. A piece of the Accursed, passed down through every respectable family in Lucis._

_When they were done they flung you off the cliff as a traitor, disgraced, to be written out of history. Your name, your deeds, the thousands you saved, will be as nothing. The last thing you clearly remember is the jerk in your gut as they threw you, the muscle-memory touch of the Armiger, and Warping downward blindly to crash face-first into the ground._

_Blindly. Ha._

_It is mostly just pain now. You do not know if it is the sheer magnitude of it that has numbed you below the waist, or if you snapped your spine on the way down. The cliff is high above you. It’s a long fall. Even with all your years of bearing hurts, it’s almost too much to endure. You can’t scream, your throat hoarse and shredded and full of blood. You can’t move. You can feel flies buzzing in your wounds, and the itch makes you want to claw your skin off, but all you can do is lay there. Lay there, and wait._

_Occasionally, people will pass and curse you. The stones they throw send shocks down your abused body, through the meat that was once your flesh, and you cry, because even after_ all this _you cannot rest._

_Twenty years. Is this what the Glacian had forseen? You being dragged from her temple and torn apart?_

_Without your eyes you cannot tell the passage of time. You have to guess. As silence eventually falls, as the distant sound of fires shifts to a low smoulder, as it grows colder, as the damned flies finally leave when the chill becomes too much and your drying blood too little of an incentive to remain, you can only guess that it is night at last. As you are at last left alone to die, you take stock of what hurts you can, to know what you must endure while you yet live. Your eyes are gone, pulp and blood on your brother’s thumbs. Your nose is smashed from your ungainly fall, perhaps one of your cheekbones with it. You still bleed from your stomach wound, your sternum is crushed. Your hip is broken in at least two places, and your left leg seems to remain attached only through sinew and blood. Your scalp throbs, and while it is a petty, vain thing, you hate that you must look a shorn sheep. The rest of you is bruises and gouges and—_

_Your sense of self-preservation has been beaten out of you, and when you hear footsteps approaching you, you don’t even bother to try and do anything other than feign stillness and death. To try and escape whatever new punishment you will have to suffer simply for the crime fo remaining alive in the face of certain death. Even as they grow near, you cannot move, cannot even lift your arms to protect your face._

_You cry when you feel hands on your shoulders._

“ _I’m sorry,” the person says, and you cry harder, your hands—scuffed and scabbed and with broken fingers and nails ripped from their beds—grasping, reaching. You touch his hand, his elbow, his shoulder, and he ducks lower so that your fingers can find his face. Even without your eyes, you recognise that scarred forehead (know when and how he got each of them), that broad nose, that short, sculpted beard. “Ardyn, I’m so sorry. I let them do this to you.” You’re crying harder as he lifts your broken body into his arms, pulls you close. It is mostly in pain, as each time he moves you, you can feel your ruined body wavering, your legs swinging with your weight. “I never should have left—“_

“ _Cor?” You whisper, and your voice sounds nothing at all like you remember your voice sounding._

_He freezes, and slowly lets you go, sets you down on the ground as carefully as he can. He doesn’t jar your leg; for that, you are grateful._

“ _Yes,” he confirms, voice shaking. “I thought you were too near death to be—lucid.” You laugh. It’s ugly. It leaves you coughing, spitting blood between your teeth. “What do you need me to do, Ardyn? I can get you out of here, if you want—“_

“ _No,” you whisper. Your eyelids are shut already, to try and protect the bloody wounds in the sockets, and you just shake your head. “No, Cor. Please.” You grasp his wrist. “How are you?”_

“ _A little bruised and trampled, Sir. A few broken ribs, I think. My head hurts something awful. I’ll be fine.” That’s a relief. They hadn’t gotten him too._

“ _Kill me,” you whisper. You tighten your grip on his wrist until your unbroken fingers are white-knuckled and the bones creak, and your broken fingers scream in pain. “Kill me, Cor. Right now. Please.” You can feel his hesitance, hear his caught breath. “Please,” you sob again. “It hurts so much, Cor. Just let it all be over.”_

_You hear the whisper of his sword drawn from your gifted Armiger. “All right,” he murmurs, and you want to cry again. He has done so much for you. Too much, too much—_

“ _Stop!” Cor’s blade freezes just above your chest. You can feel him shift. “Cor,” footsteps closer, “what are you_ doing _?”_

“ _Putting him out of his misery.” There’s the sound of someone else wrestling with Cor, and then he grunts, hits the ground beside you with a quiet thud. “Titus, get out of my way. Give me back my sword.”_

“ _You must have heard what the Consul said.” You recognise Titus Drautos’ voice now. It’s deeper than his brother’s, rougher. His accent is thicker as well; he was older when he came to Insomnia, and Cor has spent so many years with you. Cor’s accent has softened to accommodate you. You have seeped into every inch of him. “I’m not letting you get put to death for trying to intervene.” Of course; Izunia has no doubt decreed anybody found trying to help you be executed. Thrown from the selfsame cliff from which they tossed you. That is the sort of thing he would do. He demanded it for years, and you’ve always refused. Death is not a way to become a beloved king. “Get the hell out of here, Cor. I’ll guard him until His Majesty comes.”_

_He does not mean you. Of course._

_Drautos’ yelp of surprise tells you that Cor did something, and a moment later your Praefectus is crouched over you, and you can feel the chill off of his sword against your feverish face. “Well,_ _brother_ _,” Cor says, “then you’ll have to kill me first. Gods damn your loyalty to that bastard, Titus. I won’t see him suffer any longer.” You hear Drautos draw his sword as well, and_ No _is halfway out your mouth._ No, _you try to say. Over and over. You don't want him to die. You don't want him to die for you. You grab his tunic and yank,_ no, no no no, don't die for me—

_And—_

“ _I should have known you’d interfere again,” your brother’s voice says, and you hyperventilate, crying into your clenched teeth. Cor’s breathing speeds up where he’s still crouched over you. “You never did know when to leave well enough alone. I should have killed you twenty years ago, rather than letting his bleeding heart keep you alive.”_

“ _Your Majesty,” Cor says, his voice rough with defeat, and you hear him kneel. You want to beat his chest with your fists and shriek. It is all that you can to do try and grab at his tunic, to get his attention. “Stop,” you whisper, but it’s so quiet it comes out as nothing more than a breath_

“ _Your Majesty, Sire, I beg you. Please, let me just—“_

“ _Beg for what?” Izunia sneers. “My mercy, for ignoring a direct order? My brother isn’t here to cover for you any more, Leonis. You’d take his corpse even now; rob me of him? Do you think I’d let you steal him from me in death as you did in life?” Izunia laughs. “You think I never noticed the way you looked at him, Leonis? Disgusting, a man serving out of the fruit of his loins rather than loyalty—“_

_You cannot even begin to process this. Whatever that is, whatever that_ means _, you can’t even consider. It’s too much. Everything is just too much._

“ _Sire, he is alive.” Cor says instead._

_It is very quiet. In that moment, you hate him, more than you ever have before._

“ _Do it if you so wish, Sir, but put him out of his misery before it goes on. He begged me to end it for him. Let him at least pass in peace and comfort. He has earned that much.” Your brother does not speak. “At least let me help him on into the Astral realm, and then do with me as you like.”_

“ _No,” your voice cracks on the whisper as you drag on his tunic. “I order you not to die.” The footsteps come closer, and you can hear your brother’s laboured breathing. He is not nearly as well as he lets on. His lungs are failing him. “’Zunia,” you whisper, beseeching. “Please. Let him go. Let him live.”_

_You can feel Cor and Izunia looking each other over_ _you_ _like cats fighting over a morsel. Even in death, you don’t get to decide your fate. If you had been smarter, if you had been_ faster _, when they had thrown you from the cliff you would have drawn your sword, and rather than Warped with it, you would have made sure the tip pierced you through when you’d fallen. Surely, then, you would have died._ _Surely then nobody would care enough to tear one another to pieces over who gets to lay claim to your last shaking braths._

Neither of you can give him rest, _says a voice, and you hear Cor and Izunia both gasp in pain_. _Of course; her voice sounds of shouting and clamouring to them._ He will need more than this. Take him, King of Light, and I shall show you what to do.

_You do not even bother to waste breath upon condemning her. Your death has always been waiting for you._

_You can almost see the look of frustration on your brother’s face. “Fine,” he snaps at last. “Drautos, get a cart. We’ll take him outside of the city and dispose of him, burn the body there. You, Leonis—“_

_(“No,” you beg, but nobody hears you. Perhaps because you do not speak, except in your mind.)_

“ _You have still committed treason.” No he hasn’t, but you know why Izunia will kill him. Izunia hates to share. Izunia hates to share_ you _. Anyone loyal to you now will have to die. You have killed Cor. You always were afraid you might. “You’ll be executed as soon as I’ve dealt with this pound of flesh.”_

“ _Damn you,” you snarl to Izunia, when he bends close enough to you to hear you breathe into his skin. “Damn you to hell, Izunia. Damn you to a thousand hells, and may it curse you and all your descendants. May you never rest. May you know the pain I do.”_

“ _Nobody can hear you,” he says. “Nobody cares.”)_

 

 

They took Cor to the King’s empty rooms and left him there. Soon enough, Titus arrived, and stood guard over where Cor was bound hand and knee, thrown on the floor like a sack of flour. They did not once speak for what felt like long hours, as the sky began to slowly grey with false dawn outside the windows. The whole time, Cor kept his left eye squinted, his teeth grit, as the headache that had been building since he woke began to pound as a clamour as loud as a legion at march built behind his temples.

“Did you know?” Cor asked at last. His voice was hoarse from shouting invectives at Izunia’s retreating back. “Did you know he would do this?” He did not look at his brother as he said it, stared instead at the flagstones.

“No,” Titus snapped back. He still didn’t turn to look at Cor. “Do you think I would have approved if I knew?” Cor laughed, tonelessly. It sounded remarkably like the laugh Ardyn had given him all-too-oft in recent days. “I was as unprepared as you were, Cor.”

“And you think I believe that?”

“Believe whatever you like. It’s true.” Titus at least sounded disgusted. So maybe it was true. “Drama runs in the family,” he added after a time. “He should have killed the king’s accursed body in private, in the home. Like the rest of us have always dealt with it. Called it a mercy. Died in his sleep.”

Cor closed his eyes, because the thought made his stomach turn.

Hours more passed in silence, heralding in the dawn, before footsteps—hobnailed boots—approached, and the doors swung open to reveal the Consul. The King, now. Drautos snapped to attention, and Cor glared at him mutinously from under lowered brows. Where he’d been kicked in the skull his temple was still bleeding sluggishly, and the black eye he’d woken up with throbbed.

“Anything?” Izunia asked of Drautos, who shook his head.

“He’s been silent since I got here, Sir.” Even now, Drautos, taking the fall for him. _Damn_ him.

Izunia approached, and Cor could see Ardyn’s black blood all over his hands and forearms. He pulled a cloth from his belt and began to wipe it off his skin. “They’re taking him out of the city.” Izunia explained. “To be disposed of.” Cor continued to glare. Salum finished cleaning his hands, and lifted one foot, tilted Cor’s chin up with the toe of his boot. His blue eyes were narrowed, his mouth a grimace. “I’ll never know what he saw in you.” Izunia said, turning Cor’s head left and right, like he could figure him out if he just looked hard enough. “You’re stupid, loyal to a fault, and foolish. You don’t even have your brother’s martial talents. You’re a naïve little boy.”

“And you’re a lying bastard son of a bitch who isn’t worth the dirt on the sole of his shoe,” Cor replied. He knew what was coming, and he closed his eyes and braced himself as Izunia pulled his foot back and kicked him, hard, in the jaw. It didn’t break the bone, but it was a near thing, and it left his whole head throbbing with pain at each heartbeat.

Rather than scream, Cor rolled half-sideways, fell to his bound elbows, and threw up spit and bile on the floor, violently shaking all over as his head cracked apart into pieces.

“Say that one more time,” Izunia hissed, taking advantage of his prone form like a flipped insect to press the sole of his foot to Cor’s cheek, digging his aching skull into the marble floor, “and I’ll make your brother lop your head off your shoulders. I’ll make sure it’s the last thing Ardyn feels, let him get his hands ‘round your severed neck.”

Cor rolled back and spat in Izunia’s eye. The Consul snarled, blinking rapidly, wiped his eye on the back of his hand, and surged forward, grabbed Cor by his short-cropped hair, hauled his head up until his neck was stretched to an uncomfortable crick, wheezing for breath. “Better yet,” Izunia snarled, still blinking spittle from his eye, “I’ll have Titus chop off your dick and let you bleed out, and present _that_ to my brother. Finally you can give it to him. Just not the way you thought, hmm?”

Cor laughed. Cor laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until Izunia threw him back to the floor and started to kick him, aiming for his tender ribs and his face.

Titus intervened soon enough, pulling the Consul back as Cor coughed and wheezes, his knees pulled up to his chest for some modicum of protection. “Stop,” Drautos said, his voice whipcrack sharp. “You’re just antagonising him, Izunia. You know as well as I do that this will do nothing but rile him up. He never looked at your brother like that and you know it.” Cor had, he always had, he had his entire life. He’d thought about Ardyn like that from the day they’d met. He’d dreamed of it. He would have given _anything_ if the King had looked at him like that in return. “Kill him and be done with it, or I’ll take him home and do it myself.” Unspoken: _the way you should have._

Izunia’s face split in a sickening smile; there was blood between his teeth. “Swear fealty to me,” he said, “and I’ll let you nurse him back to health. He’s yours to do as you want with. I never want to see him again, but if you swear your life to me, take my magic, and serve at my side like a dog at heel, I’ll let you fuck his body like a puppet as often as you like.”

Cor hated him. Gods above, he hated this man, more than any other. If he could not avenge his Ling, he could at least honour him to the end by telling his brother where to stick it.

“Go fuck yourself,” he told Izunia instead. “I’ll serve Ifrit in hell first.”

“Kill him,” Izunia whispered, voice like ice. “I don’t care how, Titus, but I want him dead and I want to see his scalp to prove it when you’re done. He’d better fucking be in pieces, so I can feed him to my brother’s damned fish.” Titus looked haunted, and the brothers stared at one another in mute horror.

And then Izunia paused. Reconsidered.

“Actually,” he whispered at last, his face clearing, as he stepped, hard, on Cor’s broken ribs just to see him whine in pain, “I have a better idea. Bring him, Drautos. I think we can find a use for him yet.” Cor didn’t fight back when his brother hauled him to his feet, went along without complaint.

It was all out of all their hands now. His fate rested at the whims of the gods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if youre interested in some more information on the roman basis of some of the places mentioned in this chapter, check em out!
> 
> [the gemonian steps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemonian_stairs), [the tarpeian rock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpeian_Rock), and [the temper of capitoline jove/the capitoline astrals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Jupiter_Optimus_Maximus).
> 
> two(ish) more chapters to go...oh boy.


	5. eclipse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, there were two brothers who loved each maybe too much.
> 
> No.
> 
> This story does not begin there.
> 
> Once upon a time, there was a King, who did not love anybody.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huuUUUUUUGE SHOUT OUT to people who were waiting patiently for this! i promise we are trying to finish it. were almost there. 
> 
> and i posted this by the end of nov, which i said i would. nice™

Once upon a time, there were two brothers who loved each maybe too much.

No.

This story does not begin there.

Once upon a time, there was a King, who did not love anybody.

 

 

Titus uncovered the body, and Cor stared at it for a long time before he sat down hard on the ground and put his head between his knees. Titus covered the body back up and set a hand on his shoulder to ground him.

“I’m sorry,” his brother told him, his voice soft. “I thought it might be easier like this.”

It was. Cor just felt a cross between a scream and the almost-overwhelming desire to vomit building at the back of his throat.

“He’s so much smaller dead,” Cor said instead, and his voice came out so soft it was almost painful. “He’s so small.”

He had seen so many dead people in his life. His parents. His siblings. His friends, brothers in arms, soldiers, civilians, animals, people. He still remembered the summer ten or fifteen years before when a girl, maybe five, had drowned in one of the aqueducts and they’d had to pull her body out of the collection tank at the base of it before her body contaminated the drinking water. He remembered how pale and bloated she’d been, how her skin had peeled off, how she’d practically melted before they ever handed her back to her parents.

This felt a little like that.

Titus didn’t say anything for a long time, just let Cor sit there and hyperventilate. He was _glad_ his brother had shown him, because if he hadn’t, he would have automatically assumed the worst. Well—he’d seen most of the worst before, when Ardyn had still been alive. It had been by the light of the moon, and the difference between then and now was the difference between night and day. (And Cor had known Izunia for a long, long time. He could imagine—he could imagine even worse things. He could imagine worst things.)

Finally, though, Titus tugged Cor to his feet. Cor stood there, still as stone, his heart laying at his feet like something—

He felt as dead as the body in the cart. Covered with a burlap sack. All he could see, Ardyn too tall to easily cover, was his toes, the nails still finely manicured, kept short and rounded as they always were, and a few tendrils of red hair. Red hair matted black. There was a chain running to the body’s neck. Standard procedure for advanced Scourge victims; if he did reanimate, he’d be stuck long enough that they would get the jump on him.

And the shape of him. Tangled, twisted, broken, under the tarps. Still. He wasn’t breathing. His heart, Cor knew, wasn’t beating. “It’s easier this way,” Titus told him, softly, a hand on his bicep. “You know that.”

Cor nodded mutely. Closed his eyes. Let out a slow breath.

The body in the cart wasn’t Ardyn. Ardyn was dead. And so was Cor, when he was done with this one last thing. He had no delusions; he was going to die. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but he wouldn’t live out the week. If Izunia didn’t kill him, he was almost certain the injuries he’d taken in the riot, left untreated, would. And nobody would treat him. Why should they?

He was a dead man walking.

“What am I to do?” Cor asked. His voice felt dead, torn out of him inch by slow inch. “With the body?”

“Escort it to Galdin,” Titus replied, moving away. “The Astrals have told His Majesty that it has to be done.”

Cor sneered. “Just put it to a pyre and be done with it,” he snarled. A week-long trip on foot to Galdin, in the heat—there wouldn’t be much left to entomb by the time they got there. “Doing otherwise is an insult to the dead.”

Titus’ shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “You want to tell Izunia that?” His brother refused to look at Cor as he spoke; his brown eyes and craggy features faced the Citadel. Cor didn’t point out that Izunia had never wanted to hear anything from him before Ardyn had died; he hadn’t wanted anything since, either. “Because you can be my guest if you want to.” Neither of them said anything. “I’ve gathered up the remainders of the personal guard, and you will go with them there with the body. We’ll join you in Galdin to entomb him.”

Cor paused.

“ _Entomb_ him?” His brother looked back at him, and then tugged on his arm to get him moving, pulling him to the Coronae barracks. “Titus—this turns more into defiling a corpse—“

“Look,” Drautos growled, “As far as I can tell, we’re lucky he’s even letting you have the body. I’d be scared of what he’d do with it if left to his own devices. Just do it and stop trying to find _sense_ in this, Cor!”

“And you think that I’m going to come back from that?” Cor shot back, heels dug into the marble. “Titus, this is going to be a Solheim sacrifice.” It had been outlawed for years, but Cor didn’t doubt it. Izunia had always been _sickly_ loyal; he didn’t expect that was going to change now. If anything, without Ardyn tempering him, it was only going to get worse. Ardyn had always kept his brother on a leash, even if Izunia had thought it had been the other way around. “We’ll go to the grave with Ardyn if Izunia gets his way.”

Buried alive, probably. Izunia always had had a flair for the dramatic.

“And that’s not what you wanted?” Titus snapped back.

There was nothing Cor could say to that.

 

 

Titus took him to a back corner of the Citadel, a smaller courtyard, stripped of anything but the paving stones. Waiting there was the sum total of Ardyn’s personal guard that had survived the night. In total there were eight men and women, including Cor. The lot of them looked about as shellshocked as he felt, staring around blankly. Most of them were bound, and Cor went around to all of them one by one, untied them after Titus had untied him, helped them rub the blood back into their hands. He ignored their hushed and terrified questions.

He had no more answers than they did.

They were given back their weapons, since they had been lost when Ardyn had died and taken their Warp with them. They trudged, in a silent and trembling line, out to the front of the Citadel, where the cart was waiting for them. The cart, and the body, and the four strands of red hair, and the chain, and the toes, and the twisted, broken legs. In the movement down the hill, over the cobbles, an arm had been knocked loose. Five fingers, each still manicured, nails kept long and sharp. Lacquered black for the speech the day before, a lifetime, a century ago. It draped over the side of the cart, limp and still. Every time it rolled over a cobble it bounced.

Cor could see now, the way the skin had thinned. The veins along the back of the hand. How much weight he had lost, at the end. He could almost see the visible bones in his forearm, standing out against his skin. The fine red hairs.

There was blood all over it.

He stood there for a long time, his face in his hands, and shook, and said nothing. If he spoke, he was going to finally snap, he knew it. He was going to just lose it, and start screaming and never stop until they had to tear his throat out to make him. He was going to scream and scream until the walls of the Citadel came tumbling down, he was going to scream until he passed out from lack of air. He was going to—

“We’ll meet you at Galdin in a week. Make sure nobody deserts, if you can.” Cor could hear the wry smile in his brother’s voice, and he’d never been so angry at him.

“We took an oath, Titus.” Cor felt as dead as the body in the cart. “We’ll see him safely there, just like I’ve seen him safely everywhere else.” Titus softened. Set a hand on his shoulder again.

“I know. I know you will. Izunia has set guards, just in case.” _Quid custodiet ipsos custodes?_ Cor had expected nothing less.

He did not say goodbye to his brother. He didn’t need to bother. He was dead to his brother; he had been since the day before when he’d Warped off of the bridge. He gathered his soldiers and set someone to drive the cart and they marched, one last time.

  

 

By the time they stopped to camp that night, well past dark, Cor had been awake for over a full day, and the injury that he’d taken to his head during the riot had left him disoriented, dizzy, and so nauseous he couldn’t keep any food down. His fellow Coronae, deferring to him as their Praefectus, took turns helping him walk straight. He refused to put a hand on the cart.

He refused to even look at it.

When they did finally stop to rest, though, he managed to keep down some wet mashed hard-tac on the third try, and one of his newer recruits (his last new recruits) cauterised the gash over his temple with their blade heated on the fire, since they had nothing to stitch it shut with. It would leave a nasty scar half in his hairline, if he lived long enough for it to matter.

If he lived long enough for the scar to matter, he’d be in far worse shape than a few cosmetic failures. His broken ribs pained him with every step, and when Izunia had taken to kicking him like a sack of flour, it had jarred something internally, and a pain had settled low in his abdomen, nearly at his spine, that hadn’t stopped since. Still, he managed to finally fall into an uneasy, ill sleep beneath the light of the full moon, rocks digging into his back.

He dreamed that night of the day he had first been called to the King’s garden, and how he had stood beside Ardyn, pushed him in his hammock chair, listened to him talk for long hours of little and less, his toes trailing through the water of the reflecting pond, setting it to ripple. Cor dreamed of that day, and in his dream, he didn’t stand there and sweat through his tunic, afraid to say anything, afraid to speak his feelings. In his dream, he got on his knees, confessed his love, and—

The puncture wounds where once amber eyes had been looked back at him, buzzing with flies. The hand, limp, draped over the side of the hammock chair, nails dripping black blood. It was not Ardyn. Just a body. Just a husk.

He woke up crying long before false dawn, and did not try to sleep again that night.

 

 

On the third day, Cor called a halt at the high afternoon, sweating with fever as his wounds grew red and swollen, infected. He directed the soldier who was on driving duty to pull the cart off the road, under a tree. The body had not yet begun to stink and decay, but it was more Scourge than man, now. Daemons were not human. That was what he told himself. They ate lunch, more hardtack and brackish water out of whatever streams they could find.

Nobody cared if it made them sick.

All eight of them knew that no matter what happened at the end of this trek, they’d be dead. They had never even had to ask Cor; they knew. As they ate, Cor lay supine against a tree, his head leaned against his balled-up shirt, his eyes shut as he tried to fight back the headache that had settled like a thing living between the bones of his eye socket and his nose, a knife that had grown hot and legion and burning. He did not sleep; he had not since that dream, two nights before. He could not. He did not eat; he couldn’t stomach anything. He barely drank any water, and that only when he was begged. It was quiet; the breeze was warm and smelled of dirt and living things. Cor wondered what would happen if he and his eight tried to burn the body right here, a proper funeral. If the guards, standing around and laughing as they ate fig-leaf rice and grapes, would stop them. If they even cared.

The guards roused them, soon enough. Cor, too ill to walk, sat on the cart in the driver’s seat, controlling the two chocobos, as much as doing it left every hair on his body on-end. Neither one was Aurora; they were both Citadel stock, average birds. He hadn’t seen Aurora since—

He felt sick. He did not think about Aurora. He did not want to know.

He clucked to the birds to get them to go, just like he had when they’d been children on the farm, before the Scourge; they both picked up the pace, scuffing dirt and clucking as they walked.

He did not look behind him. He only looked forward, one eye squinted. Four more days to Galdin.

Cor wouldn’t live that long, but at least he could make it so they could throw his body into the ground alongside Ardyn’s, and seal the tomb with one less sacrifice.

 

 

He was the King after Sol and before Lucis and he was not sure which he was King of, not yet. Oh, he loved his people, and he loved his country. He loved his city and his Citadel but he did not love a woman. Or a man, for that matter. He did not love anybody in the way you love the person you wish to spend the rest of your life with.

This was not, in its own way, a problem. At least, not until he began to grow older.

The King did not have any siblings. He did not have any cousins. Many wars and many battles had stolen his family from him, and left him the last of his line. And as he was twenty and then thirty and then forty, it was all right, that he had no children.

And then he was fifty, and still had no children. His reign had given peace—but what would happen if he did not have a child?

What good was a King with no heir?

 

 

_(You’re naked._

_Your neck feels heavy. A collar. A chain._

_There is wood below you, and as it jostles, the pain it lances through your entire body leaves you breathless. If you could still see, the world would reel. As it is, you feel like someone has sent you spinning into freefall hundreds of feet to the ground. You feel like you are going to turn inside out. You feel like—_

_When your mind finally clears, when you are conscious again, you can hear the creak of wheels, the march of footsteps. Distant voices. The breeze is cold. You are so cold._

I should have killed you twenty years ago, rather than letting his bleeding heart keep you alive.

_There is some far away part of you that is impressed that, after the fratricide, the eye gouging, the betrayal, the years of rape of your body and mind and soul, the stolen kingdom, that Izunia has found a way to hurt you one last time.)_

 

 

_(People are talking. There is noise. You can hear them as if you are on the bottom of the ocean and their voices are travelling down to you through miles of water made of pressure so crushing you are flattened skin and bone, or like you are buried in the stone and dirt as were the Kings of old and they speak to you through the loam of your grave. You exist in a world far away, now._

_Maybe you already died, and this is your punishment. You didn’t do enough, and this is what you get. This is all the pain from all the people you could not save, visited upon you all at once. A message, writ deep within your bones, pounded into your muscles and veins that_ you were not enough.

_Time unspools around you like thread from a loom. It unravels, away and away, faster and faster with every pump of the wheel, every spin. You feel it slip through your fingers, and in the darkness, it is gone._

_You think you cry. You aren’t sure. You don’t know if you still can._

_After all—_

_He took your eyes, too. He took everything else, and that too. Insult, injury. Wounds, salt. Affront, indignity._

_Just one thing more.)_  

 

 

_(There are voices, and you cannot understand what they are saying. You can hear them, but finding where each word ends and the next begins is just simply too much. If you focus too hard, it slips through your fingers again, and you drown once more in the endless darkness inside. This time, today, the voices are closer._

_Hands peel back the canvas covering you. The air is cold; you flinch, even though no light can hit your eyes. A hand, broad and scarred, worn with age, covers your mouth and for a horrible moment_ this is it _and could it not have been something easy could it not have been something painless? Now your lungs shall seize and you will tremble and shake apart from your head to your toes until you wish they would let you die. They have found you out; this is not death. This is just more. Just more punishment._

_The hand does not press down. It simply stays, just over your nose and mouth, and your panicked, too-shallow breathing stills as you try and stop it, but the hand moves closer. It smells of blood; sick. You know the way sick people smell._

_“Water,” says a voice. You want to say you know that voice. Know it as well as you do your own garden, your own hands. But you know that cannot be the voice. You know this. There are more words, but you do not have the energy to follow them._

_You drift away again._

_How cruel that it’s almost close enough to be—)_

 

 

_(They pry your jaw open like a man would lever open a vault and drip in water. You cannot swallow it, your body too weak. It seeps down your throat on its own time, and you feel like you’re going to drown in it, but they never give enough. Hands, so many hands you cannot learn their differences, lift your head. They drip in more water. Someone puts a finger-scoop of something that both tastes like and has the consistency of sand on the roof of your mouth, and they drip more water._

_You do not know how far apart these experiences come. You have given up on keeping track of time; there is no point._

_You only know the jostle of the wood beneath you when they move; ragged splinters flaying your raw skin; the burlap above you not even enough to be called a crude blanket; and pain. Above all, you know pain._

_You try to imagine something happy when they take the burlap off, when they wipe your face with cloths and water so cold it makes you wheeze and whimper in pain, lancing down to your heels. You try to imagine the children, playing in summer. You try to imagine your garden. You try to imagine Leonis, staid and stoic at your side. You try to imagine what kissing him would have been like, when they turn your broken left leg and you scream._

_You try to imagine it. He would taste like your wine, because he always drinks with you. He would smell like your garden because he has stepped inside your sanctuary, inside your robes. He was yours, you realise now, all too late. Like your kingdom; your gardens; your gifts. He was yours, you realise, from the moment you gifted him your Warp, if not longer._

_If you still could, you would drape him in gifts. To tell him how much everything he has done means._

_He made you happy, you realise, in that dark hell your life became before you died and became this—for you are dead. You know you are dead. He was your best friend. With the hindsight of the dead, you worry you never told him enough. So many years he spent at your side, without complaint. He supported you when you were tired. When illness took you, left you miserable and ragged, he held you._

_His strong arms had been your shield. From war. From your brother. From yourself._

_What’s the point of the sun if it doesn’t have something to warm? All you are now is dying embers.)_

 

 

He saw her when he was walking one day through his gardens. They were his, and his alone, and ran deep into the palace complex. She was beautiful: as tall as a straight-backed olive tree, with hair the colour of magma bubbling free of the earth. She wore no clothes, her skin the blue of the sky, run thick with veins.

She turned to look at him, and she spoke, in a voice like thunder, that made his ears ring and his eyes water, that shook him to his bones:

_Human_ , she said, _Look upon your star, and fear_.

And he did not.

  

 

_(The hands that smell of death are back. You feel them under your shoulders. They lift you enough for more water, more food. They do not take you from the cart._

_“Please,” you whisper. The word feels thick and foul in your mouth. “Tell me I’m dead?”_

_“You yet live,” the hands reply, the man’s voice thick and wet. It is almost Cor’s voice; almost. It is what Cor would sound like, if he hated you. It is closer to Drautos than you ever wanted to think of. “For all the good it will do any of us.” He sounds angry. You do not blame him. If he is with you, then he will die with you._

_“You’re dying.”_

_The man laughs._ _“Yes.”_

_“I’m sorry,” you whisper, so tired the words fail and falter on your lips. “I’m so sorry.” You try to reach for him, but your wrists are too weak to support your hands, and they wilt back to your sides. He is dying because of you. He will be dead because of you._

_He says something in reply, but the words wash over you, in and out your ears, and you do not remember them when the darkness takes you again. You hope he and his do not blame you. You know you blame yourself.)_

  

 

_(It is night, and you know this only because you can hear the crackle of the fire, and you are cold again. They pulled the cart off of the road to put you near enough to it to stay warm, and you listen to the voices of those assembled, trying to count individual ones. You have begun to give them names inside your head: dying, sick, tired, heatstroke. Heartbroken, sore, homesick, depressed._

_These are what remain of your loyal men. These few._

_When they wake you from your drowsing to stick paste in your mouth, help you drink water, sick-hands is not with them. “The dying one,” you whisper, when someone leans close enough to hear. “Let me speak with him.”_

_“He’s sleeping.” They reply. You wonder if they would wake him, if you asked. But you do not ask. You simply subside back into silence. It is still dark when he comes. He smells of death, more cloying by the day._

_“What,” Dying says. His voice is rough, angry. He hates you, you think—you, the cause of all his suffering and anguish._

_“There is a man,” you ask, and your voice is soft and thick, dying in your throat. “Please. Were you in Insomnia?”_

_“I was.”_

_“Does Cor Leonis live?”_

_He goes very quiet. “Please,” you beg. “I must know.” Did he die for you? Did Izunia finally get what he always wanted and kill Leonis? Did his brother watch? Stars—did his brother strike the final blow? What have they done with his body?_

_“I don’t know,” Dying tells you. “If he does, it won’t be for long.”_

_You wish you could cry. You would scream your soul out until it killed you again._

_Of course. Of course.)_

 

 

_(In the end, they bring you to the ocean. You can smell it. You lay in the sun, letting it warm your cold, aching bones, and listen to the surf and the lap of the waves. Your fingers, limp on their broken-string wrists, drape over the edge of the wood of the cart. You imagine that you could dip them in the surf, and let it wash the blood and tar from your skin. To just float away. Or drown._

_Oh, what you would give to drown._

_They unload you from the cart. Nobody speaks as they do it. When your broken bones collapse in upon themselves, those carrying your load whisper apologies like it burns their tongue as sure as coals, and the boat they throw you in rocks with each dip of the surf. It takes almost all your strength to lift your hand, to drape your wrist over the side of the boat, but when it falls limply into the water, a weight you did not even know you were carrying lifts from your chest. The water is warm, salty. It stings the cuts on your skin, the gashes under your nailbeds, and it is the first thing since the moment you looked at Shiva and knew you were damned and beholden to the sins of man that has made you feel_ alive _._

_The boat rocks when someone joins you. It is Dying. He sits at the other end of the boat, and you can hear his laboured breathing as he takes the oars and begins to row. “Alone?” You ask him, all those words bottled up in your throat. He does not answer. He strains._

_He stops, very often. Pants for breath. Once, you hear him crying. He does not speak to you._

_“I do not know what I did to you,” you whisper, when the hull scrapes the shore, when they pull you from the boat again, the water stolen from you once more, “But I did not mean for it to end like this.”_

_“I know,” Dying tells you, as others take you away, place you back on the ground atop your burlap, “But it did.”)_

 

 

Eos is the star. The planet. Life itself.

Eos also was a creature of life and breath, once. She went to walk in the Good King’s garden, and saw in it that perhaps those few humans who had survived Solheim were worthy of her protection, after all.

The King, who had never loved anyone, loved her. He loved Eos. And she, in her own way, immortal and uncaring but fascinated and delighted by this strange fluke of humanity, this strange creature that would vanish as soon as she did but look away from him, perhaps loved him.

And he took her for his wife.

And that is where this story begins.

  

 

_(When they speak, they do it out of your range of hearing. You know they do it around Dying; he must be the highest-ranked officer remaining, since their Praetor is gone or shall be, sooner than not. You do not bother to strain; you know whatever they speak of either does not matter or you will know soon enough, one way or another._

_One night passes, wherever you are. Perhaps it is Angelgard; if it was Galdin they took you to, there is no other island you could be on after so short a journey. There is only one burlap sack, and you are laid atop it. In your state, as pitiable and close to death as it is possible to be, you cannot bring yourself to muster the energy to care. Let them see what is left of you._

_You know your nakedness is not the thing they look upon and recoil from in horror. You know that is the pits of your eyes. The destroyed limbs of your body. You lay where you are placed, naked and dying, and let them stare._

_You wonder if even Leonis, who loved you at your worst, when you were bruised and broken and a hair’s breadth from truly cracking forever, would be able to love you now. You doubt as much. You cannot find it within you to love yourself. How could another? How could one whom has as-good-as died at your hand?_

_The morning after you arrive, you hear another boat crunch into the sand. “Where is he?” Titus Drautos says, his footsteps loud in the sand._

_“Here,” says Heartbroken, from where she is standing your guard. Drautos stomps over. You can feel his presence; he is blocking out the sun from above you, the one source of heat you have. You know it is burning your too-pale skin. You do not care._

_“He doesn’t look alive.”_

_“Die, Drautos,” you whisper, too tired to bother with pretence. “Go die, and atone in death.” You can feel the fear, rolling off of him in waves. You wish you were truly a daemon; you could snap up in but a second and rend his head from his shoulders._

_“Is—“_

_“No,” Heartbroken says, too fast, cutting off the question. “No.” Drautos stays longer._

_“You are in my sun,” you whisper. You try to not let it sound petulant or petty. You try not to be a child; spoiled and lacking your better manners. But you still say it. He moves to the side, just enough to let the sun glare back down on you, and you whisper: “Thank you.”_

_“Move him to the cave after sunset,” Drautos says. “His Majesty comes at dawn.”_

_He does not mean you.)_

 

 

_(They lay you beside Dying. You can smell him. You want to ask him what they did to him. Why they killed him. From his laboured breathing, you know he wouldn’t tell you, even if he wanted to. He’s too far gone._

_For that long night, dark for you as is day, you listen to his breathing when you wake. You doze more often than not, and once, you feel like there is a hand in your hair, brushing it out of your face, peeling it away from where it has stuck to your skin with sweat._

_You know you imagine it, but if you had to guess, it was a sign of how close you are to the end._

_Maybe it is Cor._

_Waiting for you.)_

  

 

Once upon a time, there was a King, and he married a god.

And, as is the way of these things, she became with child.

The kingdom rejoiced, for at last they would have a new king, an heir. They rejoiced, for the child would be human—god—between the worlds, blessed with long life to lead them with a kind and steady hand, for what else could their King’s child be?

But the gods, angered by their sister’s love for a mortal, a creature of dust and death and the world below them, of the race that had nearly wiped them out in Sol, could find nothing of beauty in their union, and only horror in their production. They had created a monster through human seed and the womb of a god.

So they cast Eos down into the underworld, to seal her and her spawn away forever, that their creation not arise into horror and life.)

  

 

_(You hear them coming. “Tell me,” you whisper, to Heatstroke, “What do they look like?”_

_“Izunia?” A half-formed chide to give your brother his due respect is on your lips, but you close them around it, bite it back. No. It is not his due respect. He forfeit any title, any right to that crown, when he took it from you by force, when his impatience got the better of him and he could not wait but one day more. “They’re coming over on three ships. Fishing lorries. Drautos is with him; they’ve brought priests. Glacians, by the look of it.” A pause. “Wood.”_

_“Burn me alive?” You muse, laughing, with what little strength you have left. “Ah, he grows in cruelty by the day.”_

_“I can’t be seen speaking to you,” Heartbroken says, and pulls away, leaves you alone, to laugh into madness in your solitude. Of course: you are Accursed. You are Scourge. You are damned of the gods._

_To be seen speaking to you is damnation in death, as well as in life._

_You are honored that Heartbroken has been willing to risk that fate, to join you in whatever hell awaits you when you finally find peace, just to give you some reassurance here at the end._

_You wait, until you hear the ships land. You try to sit up, but fail, and accept that you will greet your brother sprawled naked and broken and bloody. You hear footsteps that approach, labored breathing. “Hello,” you say, “Izunia.”_

_He freezes._

_“Come to finish the job?” You continue, spreading one hand as far as you can. “You’ll find me a willing victim. Just as I always was for you in life.”_

_“Do not speak to me,” he snarls at you. “Do not imitate my dead brother in your liar’s tongue.”_

_“Oh, brother,” you whisper, laughing again. It is madness, you know, that is taking you._ Madness _. But it is madness you accept, for your life has become mad. “Whatever did they tell you to make you believe that, I wonder. I only wish my husk was speaking with you and my soul had fled.”_

_“Gag him,” your brother says, to the footsteps that have joined him. “Throw him in the tomb, put him in the shackles. All of you but Drautos leave, we will rejoin you at nightfall.”_

_“A tyrant!” You crow in delight, as hands lift your body up, under your arms. You’re screaming as they drag your legs across the ground, the left rolling wildly, still free of the socket. “You’re a tyrant, brother, and I will never forgive you!”)_

 

  

There is another story here, about how the King, robbed of his wife and his foetal child, took another for necessity, beget by her a son. There is another story here, about how the Infernian, cast down by his brethren, risked his life and sanity to rescue Eos, whom he loved most dear. There is another story here, about the tomb, and the body, and the history. There is another story here, about a legacy.

There is another story here. About a baby carried by a man whose hair burned like embers, who bled lava and sparks in his step. Who brought it, dying, to the door of a King, and handed him this crying child, with eyes yellow as sunrise, and then melted into slag upon the stone below.

That child had a brother who loved him maybe too much.

 

  

_(They shackle you._

_You don’t mind; not really. It takes the weight off of your legs._

_You hang naked in the cave, the tomb, alone. It is dark and dank. Water, condensation on the rocks, drips down behind your back. You wait until people come in, your brother leading them. He brings priests and they pray and you ignore them. You ignore their incense, the sound of them breaking ice upon the floor. You ignore the pungent stench of the sacrifice they make. A lamb, probably, innocent and slaughtered, its meat burned and the smoke of it filling the cave._

_It does not choke you, so you realise there must be an out in the ceiling; a crack. A chink. You can drink water in there, if it rains. If you live._

_They take the auguries. They speak so softly that you can’t hear their words, but you do hear the sound of your brother backhanding the priest to the ground, and you smile. You think—you know—that for the rest of his life, all of his readings from the fates will be portentous of doom. He’ll never again see anything of reassurance in the entrails or in the birds. If Insomnia wants to know what fate awaits, another will have to take the readings._

_All of his animals will bleed black with Scourge._

_After the sacrifice is done, they leave. One by one. They filter away, out of the cave, until there is only one other person breathing. The man you were the day you died the first time, when he bent over and plucked your eyes out, you would have begged him—to kill you, to do it quick, to let you live, for reassurance. You would have placed your life in his hands, and trusted him to care for it. After all; had he not always?_

_That is who you were._

_His breathing approaches. He’s panicked. He’s scared. You bare your teeth. “Frightened, brother?” You ask. His breathing pauses. “I’m a dead man strung up and still you fear me. The gods picked ill in you as their champion. Whenever you remember this, your knees will buckle and you will shake. Fear is a bad fit for a ruler.”_

_“I will cast you out from his body, and free his soul.” The Armiger shatters to life. You wonder if he means to run you through with it._

_“You’ll know not a day of peace until I die,” you whisper. “You and yours, Izunia. The ones who sold themselves to do this to me. You’ll suffer, and run yourself ragged with regret, and bleed and die. And you won’t rest until I do. Every last one of you.”_

_“My brother is dead,” Izunia says. He steps closer. You can feel the thrum of the magic of the Armiger, vibrating around him, around you. It shakes. He is agitated. “My brother is dead, and you are the daemon in his corpse. Don’t use his voice to harm me. Hold your tongue.”_

_Izunia has always told you he knows best._ Brother knows best _. Izunia can take care of you; he always has. Izunia will protect you. Izunia loves you. He’s just doing what he needs to keep you safe. To keep you happy._

 

 

_Once upon a time, I loved my brother._

 

 

_I open my mouth and laugh in his face. “Oh, brother,” I say, smiling as my cheeks ache. “You stupid fool. You really will believe_ _anything_ _the Astrals tell you, won’t you?”_

_He runs me through, and it barely even hurts any more._

_Once upon a time, I died. For the first time. For the last time._

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr and twitter @jonphaedrus did the writing, magicgenetek edited and drafted
> 
> title is from bastille's [icarus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FehA9OwZflw)


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